Photo Dump: Look in Your Archives… Again

Currently, I am deep in putting together a book of photographs. su/gar, as I call it, is a testimonial of my last seven years living in Cuba and documenting life as I saw it. The project is a bigger and more ambitious endeavor than Unfiltered Cuba, which I launched prior to a couple of presentations I had in Morris Library and Noah Webster Library.

One of the working covers of su/gar: Shadows of the Revolution.|Credit: Reynaldo Cruz Diaz

The reason why one project happened and the other is underway was my constant reviewing of my old archives. The constant search on my old folders was motivated by Covid19 and my goal of making at least one daily post on Instagram.

That of course led to interesting findings that I started putting in different folders throughout months of lockdown, making sure that I kept my social media account alive, while also escaping the stress and the depression of being isolated from the rest of the world.

Seeing those photos made me feel like I was walking the streets of Havana once again, made me remember moments, smells, tastes and sounds. But perhaps the most important outcome was finding photos that I had been thinking of for a while and others that I had forgotten I had taken.

To me, the latter is one of the strongest reasons to go through your old folders: when you inspect your work, mainly years after taking the photos, you find content that you may have initially overlooked before. After a second look, you will probably notice a better photo than the one you had thought to be your “photo of the day’”.

Although we tend to get better the more photos we take, it is a reality that some moments are impossible to be replicated. In other words, we may get better gear, better technique, better knowledge of the art of photography, be more seasoned with the camera and with a better trained eye. However, what happened once, which made us capture that moment or that photo, is very unlikely to repeat itself.

Also, even if we improve our gear and our skills, our circumstances change. I particularly have had to reinvent my street photography simply because Connecticut—especially the areas that I roam—is neither Cuba, nor Mexico, nor New York City. In other words, the areas that I dwell in the state are not as street-like as say the Big Apple, the slums of Havana, or even the colonial, yet pristine cobbled streets of San Miguel de Allende.

So, as much as I love street photography, I haven’t actually done too much of it since settling in Connecticut, simply because the particular off-the-beaten-path images I so much like to take are not that available. Ergo, even though I live in a much nicer, cleaner, safer, and more peaceful area than I did in Cuba, I can only look back at my past work and reminisce about a worse time in general, but with more and better creativity.

Of course, this has helped me get the fuel for my very ambitious su/gar: Shadows of the Revolution project. I have been able to look again, with more patience, more time, more resolve, and more purpose than before. To my surprise, I have looked into folders where I had previously found pictures that I ended up including in Unfiltered Cuba or in DOCU Magazine, and some new images have popped up. Indeed, I will need another set of eyes to look at my now over 200-picture selection.

It is not like any of us will become the next Vivian Maier—who got famous long after her death—, but there is no reason not to think that we cannot become that. And by that, I mean a photographer whose great photos emerge long after they were taken, just because they (or somebody else) took a better look at their folders and found them.