Desmemoria - Agence VU'

Desmemoria

Text : Zoé Valdés
Publisher : Éditions Xavier Barral
Release Date : 7 novembre 2019
ISBN : 978-2-36511-243-7
Book Size : 21,6 x 28,8 cm
Language : English
216 pages
140 photographs

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Pierre-Elie de Pibrac lived for almost a year in immersion with various families from the community of the Azucareros of Cuba, workers in the sugar industry and early revolutionaries. Through this experience, the photographer questions the end of utopias among a people who believed and worked for the embodiment of the castrist dream. Color portraits of the inhabitants are taken in the room and punctuate the black and white report, a visual journey showing lives that have been suspended by a thread : the interiors of homes, dormitories, streets invaded by grass, old production sites, the cutting of cane in the fields… This project tells how the Cuban population now understand their daily life, how they look at their recent history. An original short story by Zoé Valdès sheds additional light on this photographic narrative. Through the prism of various registers of images taken during this long stay and images extracted from vernacular iconography, Pierre-Elie de Pibrac shows a society that is disenchanted but also deeply attached to the singularity of its history. This photographic work was awarded by the Levallois Prize in 2018 as well as the HIP Prize for the French-speaking Photographic Book in the “Reportage and History” category in November 2020.