Still, Cuba will for a long time continue to be a backdrop for the pictures for which it is famous and loved. Palaces and mansions, marvelous architecture…now often dilapidated structures with peeling paint, relics of a once proudly resplendent time, and the old cars with their great colors, mágico, místico, endlessly photographed and compiled in lavish coffee-table books – a seductive yet limited visual vocabulary relying on nostalgia [and] melancholy…. –Petra Giloy Hirtz, in “Portrait and Milieu: El Boxeo in La Habana The Photographs of Katharina Alt”, in Boxing Cuba: From Backyards to World Championship.
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For those of us who have studied Cuba, formally or otherwise, for any decent length of time, Petra Giloy Hirtz’s observations about the outsider’s visual representations of Cuba will undoubtedly resonate. We can enumerate, as Giloy Hirtz does in this essay, the visual equivalents of the tired, typically inaccurate, and always decontextualized written descriptions of Cuba: Frozen in time. Time capsule. Hidden gem that has been forbidden to Americans, its door “closed” until recently. In addition to the “dilapidated structures” she mentions, we might add, for instance, people selling or smoking cigars (bonus points if they’re Afro-Cuban women in “traditional” “authentic” dress) and Cubans—usually from Havana, usually older in age, rocking listlessly in a living room where an image of Fidel, Che, or Raúl hangs on the wall, or younger folks, leaning on a balcony railing, a pensive gaze cast toward some horizon the viewer cannot see.
Gilroy Hirtz seems to imply that Boxing Cuba, this book of images by German photographer Katharina Alt in which the essay is published, will offer us something different, something más allá, something that expands that “limited visual vocabulary” she seems to critique. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Fourteen of the book’s initial images are bare-chested Cuban boxers, who, collected in this way, each on his own full page, begin to look like one of those “sexy men” calendars rather than a collection of photographs that shows a range of boxers moving from backyards to world championships, as the book’s subtitle suggests. How many of them can we reasonably consume? And how many should we? Many of the remaining photos are aspiring boxers, current boxers, or former World Boxing Championship or Olympic champions, their likeness shot as portraits, typically seated or standing on a street, in a boxing ring, or in a chair in their home. Taken together, they offer almost no view into the actual world of Cuban boxing, and the visual range is constricted.
This is an exhibition catalogue of images, yes, but there is a lack of stories, voice, and agency on the part of those portrayed. The prose, which is not Alt’s, indulges in too many stereotypes (namely, boxers escaping poverty, hardship, limited opportunities), casting Alt’s work in a way that she herself might not have intended. The other essays in the text are diffuse and lacking in thoughtful coherence. The most interesting among them, “A Brief History of Boxing in Cuba: From the Recollections of a Coach” isn’t even attributed, yet another problem of erasure.
Neither Alt nor Giloy Hirtz tries to portray Alt as anything other than what she is: a white German photographer who comes to Cuba with an outsider’s eyes. Giloy Hirtz even concedes that Alt’s lens isn’t technically perfect. “[T]here is not always time to arrange the scene,” Giloy Hirtz notes, as if absolving Alt of any images that might not pass our aesthetic muster. And indeed there are several that don’t, including the final full-page image, a cluster of boxers’ shoes hanging on a rail, an image that implies no motion, yet is entirely out of focus. But perhaps what is most disappointing about this book is the fact that in seeming to promise that it will give the reader a fresh vision of Cuba, it not only fails to do so, but plays into all the existing tropes that portray Cuba as static.
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For those who want to see that fresh vision come to fruition, it is worth turning to Thierry Le Goues’s Havana Boxing Club. Its 124 pages of black and white photos contain plenty of portraits (including those of bare-chested boxers), but Le Goues, who is known primarily for his fashion photography, offers a full range of images that convey an intensity and vitality congruent with the sport.
In Havana Boxing Club, subjects are portrayed from varied perspectives: an aerial shot of a ring; the just-outside-the-ring-shooting-up image of the boxer who is gathering strength from his corner, the sweat glistening on his shoulder; the extreme close-up of a boxer whose left eyebrow is covered with white medical tape, half his face in shadow. There are young boys just learning to box; there are coaches leaning in to urge their trainees to punch the tire swing with more precision, with greater force; boxers who are eating meals together; and one who has his back to the-camera in his underwear, weighing in.
Not every shot in the book is technically perfect, but that is to be expected in images that are capturing motion. Here, any shortcomings in technique are compensated for by the sense of freshness and visual expansiveness that Le Goues offers the viewer. His images disrupt the clichéd vision that clouds the eyes of so many foreign photographers who visit Cuba, producing and reproducing a limited visual vocabulary.
Boxing Cuba. From Backyards to World Championship
Michael Schleicher and Katharina Alt
Distributed for Hirmer Publishers (ISBN: 9783777426129)
Havana Boxing Club
Thierry Le Goues
Year: 205
Page Count: 256
ISBN: 9781576877838
Cover Photograph by Thierry Le Goues. Courtesy of Power House Books.