U.S. photographer casts fresh eye on Cuba
HAVANA — George “Chip” Price Cooper III (born in Georgia in 1949) has visited the island several times but only recently revealed that “my life as a photographer changed dramatically” in 2013, when, on a pictorial foray, he met two singular personages: Eusebio Leal and Julio Larramendi.
Until then, his interpretation of Cuba and its people had a different concept so, when Cooper heard Larramendi say that “the soul and heart of the Cuban people are in the countryside,” he wasted no time packing and traveling “more than 10,000 miles” through the plains, hills and mountains of Cuba’s peculiar geography, to the music of that English group known as The Beatles.
A few days ago, in association with his now-friend Larramendi (born in Santiago de Cuba in 1954) and at Larramendi’s art gallery in Old Havana, Cooper launched an exhibition titled “Farmers Into the Soul of Cuba,” apropos the international congress Anthropos 2015.
The show will soon be taken to the Vatican, to be part of the activities marking the 80th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between the Holy See and Cuba.
Eusebio Leal’s prose was present in the inaugural words for those images that are quite capable of speaking for themselves. “The dignity of the peasant family. To look at Cuba is a commitment,” he said.
Robert Stevens, art historian and photo editor of TIME magazine for 20 years, contributed these words for the show:
“This is the power and the splendor of a great photograph; this is what makes me feel that I’m looking through the window of a bus or car and I AM THERE.
“Only special photographers can achieve this. Chip Cooper and Julio Larramendi have done it and I’m glad that I was able to travel with them, through their moving images.”
For 33 years, Cooper was director of photography at the University of Alabama, whose landscapes he recalled as he toured the Cuban fields. At present, he is an artist in residence of UA’s Honors College and a member of the School of Arts and Sciences of that institution.
Harper Lee, author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” told Cooper that he was “a great American photographer, combined with Georgia O’Keefe in a single person. O’Keefe because you have her eye. You paint with film.”
At Havana’s Hostal Conde de Villanueva, where his show is on display (March 9-13), Chip Cooper told us that many people back home ask him frequently if the reason for his interest in Cuba lies in the U.S. cars built in the 1940s and ’50s that still roll in Cuba. “I come to Cuba absolutely because of its people,” he emphasized.
Cooper has published several books. He won a Prize for Excellence from Communication Arts Magazine for his book “Silent in the Land,” and received an Artist Fellowship from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.
Soon, camera in hand, 25 students from the University of Alabama will share Cooper’s impressions and heed Stevens’ assessment: images also have scent, sound, taste and touch.
