Lissette Solórzano

Lissette Solórzano is a Cuban photographer and visual artist based in Havana. She is currently the president of the section for photography of the Cuban Writers and Artists Union (UNEAC). During her three-decade career, Lissette won numerous domestic and international awards and has shown great versatility as an artist, always changing her subjects and genres while maintaining highly distinctive elegance of expression. We talked to Lissette about her background and her artistic interests, as well as her process and reflections on contemporary art in her country. 

You can view Lissette’s portfolio at her web site: www.photos-lissettesolorzano.com

La Estatua

 You attended the prestigious San Alejandro School of Fine Arts in Havana and you won a number of significant awards for your work. But how did your journey with photography first begin?

My journey with photography started gradually. At first, I was only interested in its technical aspect because I always liked to explore. I was thrilled by and attracted to the magic that was created in the darkroom: printing, developing negatives and slides, preparing the chemicals, and rediscovering the old processes of developing and printing. I wanted to know it all and I began studying photography intensely. At the end of the 80s I got my first camera, an Asahi Pentax K 1000 with a 28mm lens and later a Leica R4 with a 50mm lens. Finally, between 1988 and 1990 I began to take my first black and white photographs consciously and I began thinking about creating my own photographic opus. Later, some of those first images would become a part of my essays “Fantasmas Efímeros” (Ephemeral Ghosts) and “Por las oscuras piezas” (Through the dark pieces).  And even today I haven’t stopped studying, looking and taking photographs as part of my training and personal creation.

How would you describe your process to our readers? How much of your work is instinctual and how much of it is planned?

When I decided that photography would be my means of expression, I turned my focus towards making photographic essays. I was very attracted to the idea of reflecting on my emotional states. After preparing, I write, conceptualize, search for information and even plan my own work strategy. When I decide to start the creative process, I go out and capture images in pure documentary style, made on the street, and looking for the moment or "decisive moment" as Henri Cartier-Bresson said. But in the end the challenge is always letting myself go so that the image flows, instinctive or planned, the two resources I use together with a rigorous composition to achieve my final objective.

El pescador de sueños

When I first saw your Havana coastline series of photos, I was very much surprised by the Havana you chose to portray. For me, this is Malecon at its most magical. Right after the rain, before the crowds gather again. You captured it so perfectly - the waves the light, the clouds, the color of the ocean. El pájaro, for me, stands out as a truly beautiful work. There is something so sublime about that scene. Can you tell our readers about The Havana coastline series and about this photograph in particular?

My first attempts to make a series on the Malecon were in the early 90s, with a black and white image that I titled El pescador de sueños (The Fisherman of Dreams). For us, the coast is part of our day to day life and although many do not know how to define it, it is our great sofa where emotions and feelings flow almost naively. How to describe all these feelings in photography, I had no idea, but it wasn't until 2004 that I created the series “Havana coastline”. That is instinctively undertaken in El pájaro (The Bird/The young man in full flight to the sea). It is one of those photographs that I was able to catch because I was in the precise and unplanned moment where the entire stage was available. I was driving down the boardwalk with a small Leica and I caught it in one shot. Telling the story in this way, everything seems very simple, but here we are talking about my challenge over time, the sensitivity and training that has allowed me to respond to a whole flow of information and the ability to look and capture that unrecoverable moment. When I was doing the table work with the images that I had captured on the Malecon, I discovered where all that information that caught me came from. It was not just the man, the sea or the objects, but the Malecón line itself and its meanings on either side.

Until recently  I did not realize  that this image El Pájaro (The bird) along with the others that make up the series Havana coastline were my first digital images and were defining for my transition to the digital world. 

El pajaro

In contrast to these photographs, there is your black and white Made in Cuba and it took you almost two decades to complete it (1990 - 2009). How do you see black & white versus color photography in your work?

 For me photography is like my language I constantly see images around me as photographs, it is an almost involuntary habit. When I see an image and even if I raise the camera and see through the lens, I compose thinking in black and white. Then already in the table work the images tell me how they want to be, whether color or black and white. They speak and impose themselves many times on my own creation. I answer you as if you were seeing me inside, when I close my eyes I think about the image and then I see the color. I think that in my work I have tried to reconcile the two and find balance, although black and white continues to win my vote.

What I like about your work is that I don't see your photographs as stories. They are more like poems, they have a kind of delicate balance of form and content, regardless of the subject matter. A very special relationship to reality. What makes a good photograph for you?

 Thank you very much for your remark, I really like what you said about my work and you reminded me of an anecdote from some years ago that was a lesson that definitely marked my ideas and style when making my photographic work. Sharing with a great photographer who was reviewing my portfolio he told me: ... your images are like music to my eyes”. At that moment I was surprised that a master like Rene Burri spoke that way about my work. His words gave me the necessary tips to be able to determine where my work would go.

I always keep that in mind when choosing. I highly respect the act of selection, the image must captivate me, convince itself that it must stay and not be discarded. Generally, the images are in dialogue with each other and take you towards a concept and line of work. Others are removed not because they are bad but because it is not their time. Sometimes it is good to get away and then resume and be able to select with a different perspective. Over time you go back to review your files and maybe that image that was discarded now becomes the protagonist.

What equipment do you work with? These days, do you prefer analogue or digital?

 At the moment I have a FUJIFILM X-E3 mirrorless camera that I use with a Leica Smart adapter, a Sony Alfa RII Camera with a Smart adapter for Canon lenses. I also have some analog cameras: Canon EOS 5 with various lenses, but the one I like the most is the Linhof Technika 4x5, which I am trying to put in optimal conditions to use it again and do future work with it. I also own a HOLGA 120 and I love the aberrations that the lens makes. I am a faithful lover of traditional photography, old-fashioned with patience and darkroom processing, but I must also confess that photography made with digital cameras and printers has an important place in my work as an artist. I always try to find a balance between the two processes, and it is reflected in my work. 

Fantasmas Efimeros - El pensador

Is there a photo that you'd like to take but never did or a location where you'd like to shoot but still didn't, one that "got away"?

Now I remembered a phrase I said a while ago in an interview and a colleague friend reminded me recently: "The best image is the one you can see, even if you can't make them ". This is how I explain all those images that ran away from my shutter, but they remained in my memory. One place I have always wanted to go to take pictures is the African continent and for reasons beyond my control, I have never been able to make that dream come true.

Cuba has a number of widely known artists but only a few of them are photographers, even though Havana is a city that's often photographed by foreigners. (There is some irony in that!) From my point of view, many of these works rely on clichés and don't do justice to all the "barrios pequeños, llenos de tradiciones y emociones". I feel like we need more prominent Cuban photographers like you to really showcase the complexity of the city and tell its story first hand. Why do you think that outside of Cuba we don't get to see many Cuban photographers but we get to see so many photographs of Cuba?

 To answer this question, I must tell you a bit of history. Cuban photography has been in existence for over a century and this is demonstrated by the archives that we treasure in institutions dedicated to its safeguarding, such as the “Fototeca de Cuba”. We have generations of photographers cataloged in different styles and historical moments of the development of photography in Cuba and internationally. Many of these possess exceptional quality. In the 90s, due to the Special Period, the country had worsened and a very interesting phenomenon happened and it was that many photographers and people (tourists) with a certain purchasing power began to come to Cuba and take images and even make photographic books about Cuba. Some had visual value and others really left a lot to be desired (cliches). That almost became routine. We, the photographers of the patio, had the spirit and the quality to show our own reality, but many times the resources were missing (as you know photography is very expensive), the means to spread our photographic work and cross borders. Today I think that photography in the world is much more democratic and is a phenomenon that has become widespread as Pedro Meyer* would say, "Today we are all photographers, but with a poor visual culture." Of course, in Cuba, we are not exempt from this democratization. Although I still think that Cuban photography has exponents with enough quality, but many times we cannot reach all the circuits we want.

* important Mexican photographer and pioneer of digital photography and experimentation with new platforms

Our journal is dedicated to female artists specifically because we feel that contemporary art scene is still very much a boys' club. What is your experience with making a name for yourself as a woman artist, in Cuba and outside of it?

Actually, it was not easy for me to enter a world that at least in Cuba was almost entirely made up of men at the time that my interest in photography began. I had to demonstrate that it was not a hobby, that I could lift my camera and take photographs like them and also that it was my space for expression. Despite everything, I always had the support of colleagues with whom I learned and above all they gave respect to the work I was developing. Already at the beginning of the 21st century, the photographic production made by Cuban women began to grow and many plastic artists introduced photography as a means of expression. Today I have been in the profession for thirty years with satisfaction that my work has been seen on many circuits in the world of photography, both in my country and outside of it. I am currently the President of the Photography Section of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and among the affiliates are some of those colleagues who reached out to me.