Tours et détours, de La Havane à Paris

We have proof he was Cuban since we see him in a photograph accompanying Fidel Castro on the field in 1959, his Leica over his shoulder. But photographer Jesse Fernandez, who died relatively young at 61 in 1986 seems to have had various mother lands. He was a refugee in Spain with his parents during Machado’s dictatorship, a student in electronics in Philadelphia, an advertiser in Medellín in Colombia where he met Botero and García Márquez in the 1950s, he hesitated for a long time between the career of a painter –he produced “boxes” similar to those of Joseph Cornell and Charles Matton- and that of photographer. The book sheds light on the latter, showing his portraits, a genre he was excellent in, with snapshots of the Latin American intelligentsia in New York (Borges, Carlos Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Manuel Puig), European artists (Tápies, Saura, Kitaj, Francis Bacon), “stars” (Françoise Sagan, Elizabeth Taylor) and misanthropes (Cioran). He had the lightness of the one who takes photographs without really believing he is a photographer, but rather a mirror of souls.

• Tours et détours, de La Havane à Paris, by Gabriel Bauret and Juan Manuel Bonet, Filigranes, 2012, 200p., €29