ABOUT THE
PHOTOGRAPHS
In the fall of 2007, I was invited by Laura Bickford,
the producer of Steven Soderbergh's CHE, to photograph on the movie set of
Che part one. Laura admired my photographs from my book,
The Idea
of Cuba and she was curious to see how I would respond to the
late 1950s Cuba
being recreated by Soderbergh for the film. I asked photographer Bill
Bamberger to assist me with this shoot and we arrived on set in Campeche, Mexico
that November. At the time, Soderbergh was recreating and filming the last
battle of the Cuban revolution -- the December 1958 battle of
Santa Clara -- in which Che's forces defeat Batista's soldiers
and set the stage for the rebel's victorious trip to Havana. Within hours of being on set, with so
many things happening at once - on and off the set - I asked Bill Bamberger
to stop handing me cameras and instead to take pictures as well.
Together Bill and I photographed Che's triumphant entry into
Santa Clara, some of the street fighting, the defeat
of Batista's forces, Benecio Del Toro as Che and some of the other key
actors. We were interested in documenting the making of the movie, but also
in making pictures as if we were witnessing reality, as if the future of Cuba
was actually on the line that day.
We also photographed the rank and file rebel soldiers
and the extras from Campeche playing the
ordinary townspeople of Santa Clara.
For me these portraits are interesting in and of themselves, quite different
than the movie set photos I'd seen before. I wanted to compare these
portraits of townspeople playing ordinary Cubans at this earliest triumphant
moment in the Cuban revolution to the photographs of ordinary Cubans I had
made on the island for The Idea of Cuba during the decidedly less hopeful
last days of Fidel's rule.
--ALEX
HARRIS
ABOUT THE
PHOTOGRAPHER
Alex Harris was raised in the South and lives in Durham, North
Carolina with his wife, Margaret Sartor,
and their
two children. Harris has photographed extensively in the American South, New Mexico, Alaska, and Cuba.
His work is represented in major collections including The San
Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The Museum of Modern Art in
New York, The High Museum of Art in Atlanta, The North Carolina Museum of Art, and
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship
in Photography, a Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Fellowship, and a
Lyndhurst Prize. His photographs have been exhibited in numerous museums
including two solo exhibitions at the International Center of Photography in New York. As a
photographer and editor, Harris has published fourteen books including River of Traps (with William deBuys) a finalist
for the Pulitzer Prize in general non-fiction. His latest book,
The Idea
of Cuba, was co-published in July of 2007 by the
University of
New Mexico Press and the
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke.
Harris was born in
Atlanta,
Georgia and grew
up in the South. After
graduation from Yale in 1971, he photographed North
Carolina
as part of a Duke
University research
project. Between 1972 and 1978 he lived and photographed in Hispanic
villages in northern New Mexico and Eskimo
villages in Alaska. During these
years, Harris also began to commute to
North Carolina to teach documentary photography at
Duke. In 1980 he founded the
Center for Documentary
Photography at Duke, which he directed for eight years. In 1989,
he was a founder of The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke. Between 1995
and 1998 Harris launched DoubleTake Magazine with Robert Coles and coedited
the publication through its first twelve issues. He is currently Professor
of the Practice of Public Policy and Documentary Studies at Duke. Within the
Center for Documentary Studies, he is the Creative Director of the
Lewis Hine
Documentary Fellows Program.
To view more photos, visit
http://www.alex-harris.com/assignments/2007_che/che_2/
.jpg)
