The idea behind these pictures was to create a photographic diary of the six-week trip through Cuba. Capturing cuban everyday-life scenes with my camera, I wanted to narrate Cuba as I perceived it- to tell about a series of moments and encounters which form, as pieces of a puzzle, my Cuban experience.
Travelling through the country without a real plan, just taking the local camiones, having not much money and speaking a little Spanish allowed me a direct contact to the people, to hear their stories and o get to know sides of Cuba, which I probably wouldn’t have reached if I had travelled otherways.
I woke up in the morning without knowing where I was going to sleep in the night, my mobile phone wasn’t working and I had to count my money every night because my bankcard wasn’t working. These factors, which I saw as an obstacle in the beginning, intensified my trip and made it unforgettable. But most important of all, they forced me to live on a lower standard, allowing me in a certain way to get in a closer contact to myself.
Unfortunately when I head back to Germany I realised that the bigger part of the films I’d shot were damaged. Many pictures were completely ruined and some just in part.
The pictures that remain do not tell the whole story of these six weeks, but they give a little impression of the way I experienced Cuba.
The diary of the voyage is incomplete and many fundamental moments are gone, but still the remaining pictures give a glimpse into my experience and on the way I see and perceive what surrounds me.
About the author:
Filippo Steven Ferrara is twenty-two; he grew up in Florence, Italy and now lives in Munich, Germany and studies cultural anthropology and media.
He came in contact with photography when his sister gave him her old Nikon f60 for a trip to Istanbul, where he shot his first b/w analog pictures. After that he experimented digital, but never replacing analog with it and still photographing in b/w. Filippo is member of the autonomous art-collective “Die Baustelle”.
