The mood of the largest Caribbean island couldn’t be captured more beautifully, cleverly, sensually and accurately than this! In this book, Raúl Cañibano presents a selection from his photographic oeuvre spanning almost three decades. His surprising, caring, yet incredibly precise take and his lightening-fast, instinctive and gripping intellect let him capture moments which might seem totally familiar: normal everyday life in urban or rural settings.
His project Tierra Guajira pays tribute to Cuban farmers in an almost anthropological approach – tracing his own childhood in the east of the country. Raúl Cañibano combines it with pictures from his series Ciudad, Fe por San Lázaroand Ocaso to give us a sense of the heart and soul of Cuba.
“They all show themselves as they are, give themselves over – albeit unaware they are doing so – to the artist’s gaze basically in the complexity of their existence, granting us a glimpse into their inner selves and thus unveiling the human being in them. All Cañibano needs in order to substantiate their image are the individual and a bit of light. Nothing more and nothing less.” Leonardo Padura Fuentes
RAÚL CAÑIBANO, born in Havana in 1961, trained to be a welder and started, self-taught, to get involved with photography for the first time in 1984. In engaging with the works of the great masters of painting, he formed his own style, which he refers to as “somehow surrealist”. His work has been published in magazines across the world and shown in major photographic museums and at well-known festivals. He is a member of the Unión de Escritores y Artista de Cuba (uneac) and the Fondo Cubano de la Imagen. His pictures have been acquired by prominent public collections in Cuba, like the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, as well as by the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. He was also awarded the Grand Prix of Cuban Photography.
LEONARDO PADURA FUENTES, born 1955 in Havana, is one of the most successful and popular contemporary writers in Cuba. In 1980, Padura graduated from the University of Havana with a degree in Latin American Literature. His reportages as a journalist for El Caimán Barbudo and essays on literature and books were very successful. In 1989, he became the Editor-in-Chief for La Gaceta de Cuba and began writing crime stories and would completely reinvent the Cuban crime novel. He uses the genre as the basis for social novels which reflect the experiences and attitudes towards life of contemporary Cubans. He has received numerous awards for his work.
ABSOLUT CUBA - Raúl Cañibano
With a text by Leonardo Padura Fuentes
17 × 23.5 cm, 192 pages, 100 photos, German, English, Spanish
Hardcover, bound in linen, French-fold jacket
ISBN 978-3-903101-80-7, EUR 59.00
CREDITS
Photographer Raúl Cañibano
About EDITION LAMMERHUBER
IT’S ALL ABOUT PASSION ...
Dear fans of beautiful and sophisticated books,
“An extraordinary publisher, dedicated to little known themes, who presents them with courage and high quality, without descending into stereotypes.” This is how the jury of the FEP European Book Prize of the Year Awards argued their choice of Edition Lammerhuber for Best Publisher 2017, an accolade also awarded to the publisher from Baden bei Wien in the preceding competitions in 2013 and 2015 of this biennial event.
Present on the book market for more than seven years, with a steadily growing programme, we have worked our way to the top – internationally. Your are best at what you love doing. And we love books, we love photography. The photobook is the ideal medium to combine these loves. Photography documents the world in a very particular way and shapes human memory like no other medium does. Our ambition is twofold: We want to publish books with fascinating themes from art and science, with excellent photography, sophisticated texts and brilliant authors, but, most of all, we want to make books that have something to say, books that transport important themes into the heart of society. For us, a book charged with emotional photography is a point of reference for communication that reverberates far beyond the number of sold copies. We believe that we can make a real impact with a book. For us, a book is not just a commodity but an incomparable cultural technique.
Edition Lammerhuber wants to be the publisher for writer-photographers, for whom seeing is a vocation and whose ways of seeing the world is a process of insights. A process they are capable of transforming into the immediacy of a photograph, a creative act, initiated and completed within seconds or split seconds. As in the motto of Hungarian photographic artist László Moholy-Nagy, who declared, “Photography is there to make the visible visible.” Edition Lammerhuber strives to be home to the best ‘cyclops’ of our time, legends and new talents alike.
And how does an Edition Lammerhuber book come about? The theme must be important to us, the photography captivate us, there must be something special, magical, in the pictures. Once a decision has been made to publish, the photographer visits us at our publishing house. We go through the photographic material, determine the format of the book, think about a setting to suit the theme. This is when the almost magical process of designing and layouting starts. It usually takes about a week for the concept to be completed to the point where the work of everyone involved can be browsed on-screen, then it passes on to the next steps in the production.
Our declared aim is to approach a perfect book through a passionate creative process. Craft aspects are an essential part of it and of our publishing philosophy. All production steps up to the printing are done in our house. Our own experts produce the prepress. We really care about the reproduction quality of the photographs, the feel of the printed papers and the quality of the binding. We check every single printing form.
So it is hardly surprising that some reviewers call the books of Edition Lammerhuber pieces of art emanating from a ‘book chamber of marvels’ and that nearly all titles gather awards, including those of the Art Directors Club New York, the Deutsche Fotobuchpreis, the Pictures of the Year International (POYI) Awards, USA, the Visa d’or, France, the FEP European Book Prize of the Year Awards or the World Press Photo. Today our books are available in more than 170 countries, usually published in two, sometimes three, languages.
Exceptional photography is not only found in the books of Edition Lammerhuber but also in a photo competition jointly initiated in Vienna in 2013 by Edition Lammerhuber and the Photographische Gesellschaft. Under the general heading What Does Peace Look Like? , the Alfred Fried Photography Award, worth 10 000 euros, chooses the peace image of the year. Participation in the award has exploded in recent years, confirming the status of photography as a medium for transporting essential socio-political themes. From 2017, a separate competition for the peace image of the year is open to children up to the age of 14.
At the biennial LUMIX Festival in Hannover, the Lammerhuber Photography Award for young photo journalists is presented, with a prize money of 5000 euros. Photography and the photobook are an essential, defining, medium for society and for our publishing house. This is why we believe it is important to encourage young photographic talent.
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Yours
Silvia Lammerhuber and Lois Lammerhuber
Publisher