Ernesto Sierra Pablo Tarrero is a very unique photographer. Lively, learned, observant, a tireless walker who has strolled the streets of Havana, Cuba for the pleasure of enjoying a city that he has managed to make his own, meeting its people, coming into their homes. He has lived in it as one more and that experience has given him a privileged view, which he now reveals with insight and intelligence. His photographs shun the common, worn out clichés, often attributed to Cuba and its capital. The viewer will not find here the spectacular mulatto women, the antique cars, the drums and quasi-folk rituals, sprinkled with rum and sugar. Pablo is very distant from the touristy vision and from the apocalyptic view of those who seek blemishes in the history of the largest of the antilles.
One can almost feel the tenderness, the complicity, and the identification with the fate of his art object. More than the city’s physical geography, Pablo portrays the spiritual geography of the locus, that Havana that leaves no trace in it his mind via its buildings, parks, plazas and monuments, but through the very small, intimate everyday details. In his representation of the walls, in their very texture, he alludes to the skin of the city, one that keeps in its scars, in each corner’s footprint, the memory of whole generations.
