IPS-English CUBA: Remembering Baldrich Through His Lens
 
Date: Thu, 01 Nov 2007 15:53:33 -0800

 
Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Nov 1   (IPS)  - One of Ángel González Baldrich's lifelong
friends and colleagues at the Cuban newspaper Juventud Rebelde once
wrote that by a conservative estimate, the photojournalist took more
than 70,000 photos and had around 10,000 published in different papers
and magazines in Cuba.

”An impressive number!” remarked Luis Hernández Serrano, the reporter
who published the only interview that Baldrich ever gave in his five-decade
career. 

At the time of his death late Wednesday, the photojournalist was
considered one of the best in Cuba, as well as a true artist.

In the past few weeks, a group of reporters have been digging through
his enormous archive of photos to select 70 to be included in an exhibit
of his work, which he kept postponing because of qualities that are
rare to find: modesty and humility.

Organised jointly by the Cuba bureau of the IPS (Inter Press Service)
international news agency and Juventud Rebelde, the exhibit, titled
”70 X setenta” in honour of his 70th birthday, opens Nov. 12 in Havana
and will tour other Cuban cities in 2008.

”We never thought it would be so difficult,” commented Elsa Methol,
director of the IPS office in Cuba and one of the driving forces behind
the initiative. ”Every time we have the selection ready, new photos
turn up that really should be included, even some that have never
been published.”

A derelict building in Havana sporting a sign that has withstood
the passage of time and which reads ”La Maravilla”; Cuban soldiers
who, as they return from Africa, gaze with wonder on the city from
the prow of a ship; kitchen utensils; a dog walking down a lonely
street; a woman carrying sunflowers.

His photos show urban and rural landscapes, details of everyday life,
but above all, people. The faces of women, of children, of young and
old illustrate the line of work in which his greatest mastery shines
through. ”I love portraits, because for me, there is nothing more
important than the human being,” Baldrich once said.

Accredited as a photojournalist with IPS in Cuba since 2006, Baldrich
was born on Jul. 29, 1937, and at the age of 20, after cleaning the
floors of buses where his father worked as a ”guagüero” (bus-driver),
he entered an advertising agency as a photography apprentice.

His first photos in the press were published after the Jan. 1, 1959
triumph of the Cuban revolution, in the magazines Pionero and Mella.
In 1965 he became one of the founders of Juventud Rebelde, Cuba's
second-most widely read daily newspaper (after Granma), where he worked
until last May.

In 1988, he was a war correspondent in Angola. As part of his work
for Juventud Rebelde, he also travelled to the Soviet Union, Italy,
Canada, Germany and Spain. His work brought him a number of prizes,
such as the Félix Elmuza award, the highest distinction granted by
the Union of Cuban Journalists (UPEC), which he was given in recognition
of his lifetime of work in the Cuban press.

”The requirements for being a photographer? Observing everything
very closely, being sensitive to the good and the bad, happy and sad,
picturesque and grotesque. The desire to show people images of things
that we see, but which because of their work, many do not have the
privilege of seeing,” said Baldrich.

Of all of his photos, his favourite was a backlit picture of Cuban
President Fidel Castro taken on a winter night from about 15 metres
away, just as the leader was about to climb up onto a platform. 

When the photo was finally published 10 years after it was taken,
it filled the entire front page of Juventud Rebelde.

Baldrich also loved a photo of fishing boats in Cojimar, a small
village outside of Havana. He took the picture during the production
of an article on U.S. writer Ernest Hemingway by Cuban novelist and
reporter Leonardo Padura, and hung it on a wall in his small house
in La Palma, a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Havana.

Nearly 20 years after he left his job with Juventud Rebelde, Padura,
one of Cuba's most popular contemporary writers, recalled that ”on
each of the hundreds of occasions in which I worked with Baldrich,
two things that highlighted his capacity and professionalism invariably
occurred.”

”The first happened when I would take the liberty to ask him if he
had shot such and such a photo of the person or place appearing in
the interview or article, which was indispensable. His reply was always
the same: ‘It's already done'.” 

And the second occurred when Baldrich ”turned in the photos taken
in the heat of the job.”

”Besides finding that all of the photos that I needed were there,
I always discovered that they were better than I had imagined, possessing
an impact and insight, as well as a quality of composition and handling
of the light, that are infrequently seen in the Cuban daily press,”
wrote Padura in the exhibit catalogue.

”I don't know how many times I saw him with his camera, in a corner,
observing from behind his lens,” Raquel Sierra, a reporter with the
Tribuna de La Habana weekly and one of the photojournalist's old friends,
told IPS. ”He never boasted or posed, never fought to be out in front,
never took 100 photos just to get one good one. Baldrich would gaze
and gaze through his lens, and when he would shoot, that would be
the one.”

”I love his photos, but I valued his friendship even more,” she added.
”There was a time, during the worst period of the crisis of the 1990s,
when we were always hanging out together. Another woman friend and
I called him ‘super Baldrich', because he was always there when we
needed him. He could fix a stove just as easily as he could clean
his camera lens.”

Padura, Sierra, Amado de la Rosa, Alex Fleites, Angel Tomás, José
Antonio Evora --these are just a few of the Cuban reporters who found
in Baldrich an ideal colleague but especially a loyal friend, a man
of few words who reserved his insightful observations and incomparable
good humour for his friends.

Despite his exceptional professional and human qualities, he suffered
the effects of other people's envy, opportunism and mediocrity. But,
said Padura, he never ”allowed resentment or frustration to get the
upper hand,” and ”he did the only thing he knew how to do: show up
for work every day and always do his very best.”

In the exhibit, ”we are recognising, even more than the fully dedicated
photographer, a kind, loyal, overly modest man who made a gift to
us of his friendship and his company,” said the writer.


*****
+ Q&A: ”My Work Reflects These Dark Times We Live In” (http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39887)
+ Q&A: ‘Being Silenced Is So Serious That the Reason Pales in Comparison'
(http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39688)
+ More IPS News on the Arts  (http://ipsnews.net/arts.asp)


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