黑料不打烊

Gilda Pérez. Untitled, from the series Calle Obispo. La Habana, Cuba, 1983

Born in 1954, in La Habana, Cuba, Gilda Pérez was raised in the countryside until she started her career as a photographer back in La Habana under the teachings of renowned Cuban photographer Tito Álvarez (1916-2002) in the year of 1978. She first debuted in the photographic world back in the year of 1980 when she captured the jury’s attention at the Salón Juvenil de Artes Plásticas, in La Habana; in 1987 she would do the same in the Salón Juvenil de Fotografía, this time in Santiago de Cuba, where her first works were awarded for their quality.

Along with her late husband Ramón Martínez Grandal (1950-2017) and Rogelio López Marín (Gory), Pérez is considered one of the pioneers of documentary photography in Cuba, taking her first steps in line with the classical principles of it, but later infusing it with her own particular gaze, searching for intimacy and for a more symbolic approach than most of the members of her generation.

This can be appreciated in the series Out of Home (“Fuera de casa”) that she developed from 1995 up to 2014, during her stay in Venezuela, a deeply poetic and intimate study of her life as an immigrant that, ironically, she realized from inside her house in Caracas. This series, as described by her daughter Kelly Martínez-Grandal, is marked by an incredibly serene gaze, something that comes from her early childhood, being part of a family of countrymen, which Pérez is enormously proud of.

Gilda Pérez. Untitled, from her series Guajiros. Tapaste, Cuba, 1978

Her work, which has been exhibited (both in group and solo shows) in Cuba, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, the U.S. and Venezuela, is part of prestigious collections, both public and private, from Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, such as: Musée de l’Elysée and Photoforum Pasquart (both Switzerland); Lehigh University Art Galleries (Pennsylvania, U.S.); Museo de Bellas Artes de Cuba, Fototeca de Cuba and Casa de las Américas (all in Cuba); Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas and Archivo Fotografía Urbana (both in Venezuela).

In the words of Venezuelan writer Susana Soto Garrido, “The Cuban was, by numbers, not a significant immigration to Venezuela such as other immigrants coming from different places of the world; the United States, however (...) became, as it is known, the second nation of the bigger part of this contingent… The number of Cuban immigrants in Venezuela could have risen up to forty thousand people, most of them exiled for political reasons…” (Soto Garrido, Fundación para la Cultura Urbana, 2007).

After the Cuban Revolution started back in 1959, millions of people left the island by different means. There are several important migration milestones for the Cuban people: first the so-called “Éxodo de Marioca” (1965), then “vuelos de libertad” from the U.S. (between 1965 y 1973), the “Éxodo del Mariel” (1980) and, finally, the “crisis de los balseros” (starting in 1990). In addition to these milestones, we find the treaty of the Cuban exile between 1979 and 1984, which coincides with the renewal of the diplomatic relations between Cuba and Venezuela during the government of Carlos Andrés Pérez (1973). Making use of these and other mechanisms, Cuban citizens have left the island and made their homes in other countries all around the world; an image akin to that which tons of Venezuelans have been facing in these last twenty or so years.

This is the scenario in which Pérez, along with her husband and their daughter Kelly – who later followed her parents’ steps making a career of her own as an investigator, poet and photographer – arrived in Venezuela in the decade of 1990. They arrived with an invitation letter to work in the country: “...artists had certain privileges to travel inside and outside of Cuba, but you needed an invitation letter and the approval of the Ministry of Culture to leave the country…”, Kelly remembers.

Gilda Pérez. Untitled, from the series Out of Home. Caracas, Venezuela, 1994-2014

In Venezuela, Pérez would take part in the, by then, vibrant world of local museums and art galleries, exhibiting her work in both collective and solo shows, while also imparting classes on photography. All of which she did working closely with her life partner. Later, in 2017, when political tension, poverty and famine started to show their ugly heads in Venezuela, along with riots and military repression, the family left Caracas and established themselves in Miami, Florida, where Grandal would later pass away.

Even though it is in her later years that she has been living in the U.S., Pérez's link to this country runs deep into her career. Along with Martínez Grandal, she became one of the first Cuban photographers to exhibit her work in the U.S. after the ending of the Cold War. But it is also very important to signal the influence that renowned American photographer Robert Frank (1924-2019) and his famous photobook The Americans (1958) had in her work and that of her generation.

Robert Frank. Covered Car. Long Beach, California, U.S. 1971

Gilda Pérez. Untitled. La Habana, Cuba. 1986

Gilda Pérez’s photography capture little slivers of the day to day life; moments and objects are captured by her eye and her documental gaze always attentive to the details and the composition, but also, a gaze charged with a deep poetic way of thinking: in her work the documental and register aspects of photography go hand in hand with a rich symbolic charge which puts her images in the same level as visual poems.

Gilda Pérez. Untitled. Laguna de la Leche, Morón, Cuba. 1986

This happens because it seems that Pérez, rather than immortalizing objects, landscapes and people, is capable of apprehending the poetic essence of them, like she is trying to capture for her own a world to which she is an observer and a witness. This voyeur kind-of-poetic-explorer gaze leaves us with some tranquil moments, captured by her lense, some filled with a deep sense of longing, others like quick, fleeting instants, snapshots of a life happening so fast… But in all of them an atmosphere of quietness, of solitude, like the passengers of the guagua have all taken a second to exhale deeply, like the farmers in the countryside have suddenly stopped to regain their strength and remember the meaning of their work… Like that couple, sitting together, looking at a big body of water, immersed in each other and the vastness of nature.

Gilda Pérez. Untitled, from the series Out of Home. Caracas, Venezuela, 1994-2014

In two photographs from her series Away from home, Pérez looks at us from her reflection in the mirror; the cluttered bathroom cabinet in her house in Caracas gives us a sense of belonging, but also of loss and grieve, like the photographer is both at home at the moment and not at all, surrounded by the mundane items that form a life. In a way she is letting us in her home, but also inserting herself in our environment, like Diego de Velázquez’ “Las Meninas”, in which we assist a complex scene from the reflection in the mirror of those who are being portrayed by the painter. Perhaps Pérez is not only capturing her quietness, her loss and solitude… She is capturing ours.

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