PARADISO

Let us begin by suggesting an immediate, ordinary and obvious reading. A reading that we could all put forward, even without thinking - a reading that, inevitably, would be shared by all those, evidently a huge majority, who consume images in a contemporary society saturated by them. Let us pretend we know nothing about photography and its contemporary concerns, that we are naïve and unsullied, and simply find ourselves confronted by a collection of vibrant photographs that seduce us from the outset.

The obvious asserts itself, this is a question of colour photography. We will return to it, but this obviousness, this immediate response, is the basis of what we are in the process of looking at. A beach, in colour, creates an immediate perception, stronger than subject, location or any underlying intention, and it is how this asserts itself that is the very nature of what we will decipher. This sensation is rare because the practice of colour photography is recent, and because, in its development, it has the benefit of scarcely half a century of serious aesthetic research into the nature of the medium used. Forget the valiant experimenters, who sought from the beginning to fix or reinvent shades of colour - from potato flour to learned declensions of watercolour - often in relation to a legitimate fascination for art history and, of course, painting. The history of photography is inscribed in black and white, and until recently, mainly in the field of reportage, photographers contented themselves by simply substituting their usual film for a colour medium. They continued in the same way as before, taking photographs in colour and not yet colour photography. In order to situate things historically, it is sufficient to know that colour as a photographic material only fully asserted itself at the end of the sixties and in the seventies with authors as important, and as varied in their aims, as Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerowitz or William Eggleston amongst others.

It seems important to me to clarify this, because publications in colour abound - in the press, in advertising, and in the seductive form of the book, multiplying works that boast the beauties of elsewhere on the planet, or of sublime historical heritages. They affirm colour as if it were a natural given - more than real - never thinking that photographic concerns are linked to the choice of media used to capture shades of colour.

Lorenzo Castore, a young Italian photographer belongs to an emerging generation who, fed by a serious
knowledge of the history of photography as art history, know that their "technical" choices have serious consequences for what they want to express. On another large project currently in progress - about how dictatorships manipulated minorities (in Italy, Spain and Poland) - he is working in black and white, a clear decision to adopt an approach which relates his work to the history and the imagery of the period. And finally, to come to the work that constitutes this book, when he chose colour to invite us to his Cuba, it was for a purpose.

Anyone who has been to Cuba will have been struck by the physical presence of colour in this jewel of the Caribbean; by the luxuriance of the sunsets and by the way that, at different hours of the day, the light glorifies shades of colour. Inevitably magazines tend to feed off our fascination for exoticism, marrying Havana's Malecon promenade with the vintage traces of sublime American cars of the fífties - long candy-pink convertibles set against a background of flaking ochre façades. And by doing so they have invented an iconography of universally accepted stereotypes. These are difficult to overcome.

Lorenzo Castore decided to work in colour in Cuba, as well as in the images of Mexico in the book. This placed a real constraint on him, deciding to put into colour a part of the world that we never see except in a complacency of colours - alternately saturated or subdued into pastel tones - suitable for the tourist office and the travel magazine, to the extent that nothing photographic makes them stand out.

Cuba, for Lorenzo Castore, is a pretext. Simply a moment of life, of happiness, of discovery and of pleasure.
A moment in his life when he decided to push his photography to its limits. Living and photographing, in an honest way, both in relation to himself, and in relation to the people he met, with whom he interrelated and to whom he became attached.

The places that he chose: a bar which became part of his daily routine, with his actors, his characters, a transvestite who becomes both a model and an accomplice to endless sadness. A street that fascinated him, the light that seduced him, a girl who smiled at him, the rain that transformed everything - reinventing the space as a vibration of impossible yellows through which a character crosses, then disappears forever. A vision. Then. in a street, a space shared between inside and outside, a vibration of blues, welcoming characters we will never know, nonchalant, at ease. A little further off, in an alley, a forgotten red ball structures the space; it is the same vertical vision as that of the child crawling in a corridor that we find elsewhere.

It is only a question of small events of light, of those which make up the shades of colour, reinventing spaces with the repetition of colours rubbed up against one another: It is only a question of the echo of experiences of someone available, or simply attentive, to what happens at each instant.

So, a perfectly photographic obviousness imposes itself. An obviousness that relates to the decision of a traveller who is empathetic to the space which welcomes him, one who decides simply to keep a trace of it. Who decides not to describe, but to inscribe himself on a place that he experiences - to speak, to say, to transmit as much what he learns about others as he ends up finding out about himself. He makes images and takes responsibility for them. He knows what motivates him - the improbable movements, the atmosphere in which he recognises, finds and expresses himself. He likes to astound us with his surprises, he chooses to make us meet the characters who enchanted him in the Caribbean sunshine and, above all, to make us share the obvious softness of atmosphere. A languor crossed with strident moments, with permanent surprises awaiting the eye that knows how to caress them, a slow rhythm which can suddenly break loose from an unexpected blue, that can make a hole in the golden vibration - and make us doubt, day or night, the reality of the moment captured.

It is for this reason that, photographically, only colour remains - colour that is the exact opposite of that used by all those who approach Cuba as a backdrop, a decor in which to make images. This is colour as a fundamental, a given of a place in which to meet 'others'. Others without exoticism, who are our contemporaries, perhaps less fortunate than ourselves, who tell us that colour is not just the background to a seductive scene, but rather the material and the flesh of what a photograph can transcribe.

It is up to you to dream the rest, for want of experiencing it.

Text by Christian Caujolle