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At some point, almost every person alive gets the urge to drop everything and leave the country… go off and live in Shanghai, maybe, or a shack in Africa.
Tony McKissic went to Cuba.
He took a suitcase, a camera and a diary. And what happened to him over the following weeks is one of the most unusual stories we’ve come across. What’s even more unusual are the careful, elegant photographs he took along the way.
In one photograph, for example, a Cuban girl stares into the camera.
But it’s not a portrait. It’s not a captured moment. It is not a Cuban girl in a trapped chunk of space and time.
Rather, it’s a document of raw emotion.
There’s a famous rollercoaster at Disneyland called Space Mountain and that’s what the Cuban girl’s eyes are like, thrilling with sudden joy.
Small-town life is featured in McKissic’s black-and-white photographs: boys playing street soccer, children staring from broken windows, a car from 1950s Detroit by a ruined building. What results is a warm, steady look at the exotic.
So what happened to McKissic while he was in Cuba?
He disappeared. He became a writer. He became a Cuban. He became a man whose only real existence hinged on taking photographs and writing captions about them. All this and more. His diary reads like Japanese haibun, an epic travel poem mixed equally with scribbled prose and sudden one-line haiku:
Be ware of her eyes. If you are not careful she will have you dancing to a beat that will hold you forever. Never felt polyrhythms in the form of someone like this before. Oh yes, some say she can lure you into her thighs and turn you into something other than yourself.
McKissic describes his work as “snippets from a dialogue” and it’s easy to see why. He’s a man of huge verbal ability, the guy in the bar who can grab your attention and hold it for hours at a stretch, just by telling his own travel stories.
Opening Exhibition : Saturday, Jan. 26 from 6 to 8 p.m.
On Display: Jan 26th - Feb 9th .
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