Dede Pickering | Cuba

Photo © Dede Pickering-All Rights Reserved

Dede Pickering has been super busy for the past six months, having traveled to India, Cuba, Colombia, and Iceland. Having retired from the corporate world, she became a photographer, and traveled to Antarctica, Mongolia, Tibet, Nepal, Bhutan, Burma, China, Cambodia, Peru, Patagonia, Kosovo, Albania, Rwanda, New Zealand, Guatemala, Cuba, South East Asia and has made multiple trips to Africa and India.

She recently updated her website with galleries of these travels, and I chose to feature one of Cuba 2013. Influenced by the work by travel photographer Nevada Weir and others, she is a member of the Explorers Club in New York

In 1998 Dede took on a full-time volunteer position with CARE, a global private humanitarian organization, to start the Women's Initiative, aimed at connecting American women professionals with women in the developing world. She served as chair of the Women's Initiative until 2004. Under her leadership the small group of volunteers raised awareness and a minimum of $150,000 annually to benefit poor women and their families. Dede was also a CARE Trustee and a member of the advisory committee for CARE's Campaign for Education.

Eric Kruszewski: Cuba

Photo © Eric Kruszewski-All Rights Reserved

Eric Kruszewski's Cuba gallery made me yearn to revisit Cuba having been there on a week's photo workshop over 10 years ago.

It's heaven for street photographers...Just look at the photograph above, and see how he compartmentalized the scene using the columns and the scaffoldings. You'll see others in the gallery, including nicely composed scenes of youngsters playing street baseball.

An engineering vocation took Eric to perform construction assessments in in former Soviet Union countries such as Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Georgia. It was there that he started to pick a camera to share what he saw and experienced. In mid-2010, he returned to the USA to evolve his craft, develop personal projects, and discover opportunities to share stories with a larger audience. He began pursuing photography full-time earlier this year.

Don't miss Eric's poignant documentary movie on Courtney Gilmour, whose birth defects are consistent with exposure to pollutants during her mother's pregnancy.

Aujin Rew: Cuba

Photo © Aujin Rew-All Rights Reserved

Born and raised in South Korea, Aujin Rew is a freelance photographer based in Singapore. Having studied engineering at Stanford University, she had recently undertaken long travels in South and Central America.

Whilst there are quite a number of galleries on her website, I chose to feature Aujin's work in Havana in which she makes a lovely use of the city's light. Don't miss her lovely photograph (fifth in the series) of a street scene in Havana...a scene with a number of protagonists frozen as if in suspended animation. To my mind, this photograph encapsulates all the ingredients of a successful street photograph in the real sense of the word.

I met Aujin at the Foundry Photojournalism Workshop in Buenos Aires, where she attended a class by the legendary Ron Haviv.

Alex Webb/Rebecca Webb: Violet Isle

Few people interested in photography don't know who Alex Webb is, so I'll keep this introduction brief.

He began working as a professional photojournalist in 1974, and joined Magnum Photos as an associate member in 1976, and a full member in 1979. He photographed extensively in the United States, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and in Turkey. His photographs have appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, Life, Geo, Stern, and National Geographic, and has published many books.

Rebecca Norris-Webb is an international photographer and poet.

Violet Isle is featured by Magnum In Motion, and showcases Alex’s exploration of the streets of Cuba and Rebecca’s discovery of unique and sometimes mysterious animals. While the photography styles of this husband-wife team is distinctly different, they decided decided to weave their images together to create a multi-layered portrait Cuba.

While you watch the audio slideshow, you'll see this combination of the two styles...the typical street scenes, color saturated with lots of shadows, reflections, sun-drenched walls...and more ethereally, many caged birds, a metaphor for Cubans. The soulful soundtrack is Silencio by the Buena Vista Social Club.

Would I have preferred to hear a soundtrack of ambient audio and music recorded in the streets of Havana instead? Yes, of course...no question about it. That being said, anything by the Buena Vista Social Club is great.

Jeffry Plomley: Havana

Photo © Jeffry Plomley-All Rights Reserved

I caught Jeffry Plomley's work on The Leica Camera Blog, and was immediately drawn to his Havana gallery, which features excellent street scenes that are very nicely toned. A Canadian photographer, he has the ability of traveling to Cuba as freely as he wishes; something that we here in The United States cannot do as freely.

Jeffry tells us in the Leica Camera Blog that he considers Havana to be one of the world’s meccas for street photography. This is not an exaggerated statement, but one that I wholeheartedly endorse since I visited the island and its capital (legally) in 2000. In the first part of Jeffry's post, he also describes his choice of gear, packing two M9s and two M7s, with 21mm Elmarit Aspherical, 28mm Summicron Aspherical, 35mm Summicron Aspherical, 50mm Summicron, and the 75mm Summicron Aspherical. Phew!

There's also a wonderful gallery of Cuban boxing action, which I recall was a huge attraction to the photographers who were attending the workshop I enrolled in.

I suggest you choose the slideshow option, but watch it in full screen. Don't miss the one (#13) of an elderly Cuban patting a dog...grest shot!

Sam Chadwick: Cuba & More

Photo © Sam Chadwick-All Rights Reserved

Sam Chadwick is a travel photographer and a Hell's Kitchen (NYC) resident where he works on a variety of photographic projects and planning his next photographic travels.

He started photography as a main means of documenting his 5-day ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro. Since then, he traveled to over 50 countries, creating a large collection of images of people, cultures and environments. In 2007, he reached the semi-finals of the Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year, and his images have appeared on Reuters.

You can see his many galleries on his website, from Guatemala, Belize, Nepal, Costa Rica, East Africa and my favorite Cuba.