Botoño

I used to think this was my grandfather, Tomas.  I found it in a pile of pictures in my aunt’s house in Havana.  I’d never met him, but I knew of him.  He was a cop, who beat his kids, cheated on his wife, and left them.  My father almost never spoke of him.  I thought he looked like my half-brother.

On my nephew’s birthday I sent this image to him.  “Here’s a picture of your great-grandfather.”  His father had to set me straight.  “That’s Botoño!”

 Botoño was the man who married my grandmother after my grandfather left her with four kids and no way to support herself.  She was taking in laundry and reading fortunes to stay alive.  My father had to hustle and find money to help the family get by.  But Botoño married her and helped her raise her children.  Everyone who knew him spoke fondly of him.  My father loved him.  My cousin learned everything from him as a child.

 They were both cops, but that is where the similarity ended.

 My cousin tells the story of the first time he put on his highway patrol uniform.  He was wearing the same boots.  When my father saw him a tear came to his eye.  He said, “You remind me of your grandfather.”

 I have no picture of Tomas.

Rene' and Narcissa

In my family there have been many romances, but none as photographic as my Aunt Narcissa’s (Cucha was what everyone called her) to her husband Rene’. He appears to have been an amateur photographer and documented almost every part of their relationship. Most of the photos are of her, dressed as a bathing beauty or engaged in some activity they would do in their leisure. The rare ones are those like this one, where it is the two of them alone, documented by some third wheel that was with them at the time. They married in their twenties and had my cousin Renesito sometime after that. Rene’ was a jeweler, so they probably wanted for nothing. But the revolution changed all that. Soon, he got sick and died. Then Renesito. By that time my aunt was the only one left to take care of my widowed grandmother, as everyone else had died or emigrated. Once my grandmother passed Cucha developed dementia. There was no one left to take care of her but friends and my father was never able to get her out. I guess it makes sense that in her possessions I would find all the pictures from my father’s side of the family. Many of him had been destroyed to hide their relationship to the enemy of the state. When others left or died, they left their pictures with Cucha. There were rules as to what you could take. Most of the pictures are the ubiquitous family snapshots, my Aunt Leonor’s wedding pictures, and then there are all of Rene’s photographs of Cucha. Just from the sheer volume and the feeling one gets from seeing her as he did, you can tell it must have been some kind of love affair.

Leonor in the Mirror

My Aunt Leonor was the baby of the family.  She was my father’s dance partner.  Whenever there was a dance, people would come and find my father and say, “Bring your sister, everyone wants to see the two of you dance.”  My grandfather was not pleased and would tell them, “What are you, monkeys performing for the crowd?”  But that never stopped them.  She married a cop, my Uncle Oscar.  Who knows if my great grandfather, a cop, or my grandfather, a cop, or my dad, who had worked for the cops, had anything to do with it, but the pictures suggest that they were happy?  After the revolution, my uncle had been jailed for failing to arrest my father.  After my father left, they lived in Cuba until my father could get them out.  When they applied for visas, my uncle was punished by being forced to work in the sugarcane fields for a year.  The Cubans called anyone who left “gusanos,” worms and they were persecuted until the day they boarded the plane for the United States.  Once they got to New York my father set them up in a building where he was the super and then eventually in subsidized NYCHA housing in Hell’s Kitchen.  This must have been her in her bedroom.  It was there that I met her in my late twenties.  Until that time I didn’t even know that she, my uncle, and my cousins existed.  My father had kept us apart for the first half of my life.  We lived in Miami and everyone else lived in New York.  I guess my stepmother and half-brother, who my father lived with in New York, couldn’t handle the competition.  From the minute I met my aunt I felt the love she was capable of.  Of all of them, she is the one that looks the most like my father’s Chinese side of the family. She always reminded me of my grandmother. I don’t think she had a mean bone in her body.  My father had the monopoly on that.  When she died my father spoke.  He cried.  It was probably the only time I ever saw him do that in public.  He thanked my uncle for taking care of her for all of those years.  My uncle died a few years later.  I wonder when the last time was my aunt and father had had a chance to dance.  Maybe my first wedding.  I’m sure they put on a show.

Tomas and Manuel in Uniform

What you’re looking at is the first two generations of police officers in my family. On the left is my grandfather, Tomas, and on the right, my great grandfather Manuel. Is it any wonder my father wanted to be a cop. He never finished the third grade so that was out. He became a bus driver and my uncle Marcelo followed suit. But my aunt married a cop, and their son became a cop. Marcelo’s daughter, Georgina, married a cop. So, there’s something there. It’s hard to tell if my grandfather inherited other traits, such as a propensity for violence, alcoholism, and womanizing. My father inherited two out of three of those, but he always came off like a dry drunk to me. My cousin was a highway patrolman and wore boots much like these. He may have also succumbed to our family disease. When my aunt died, he had all his colleagues give her the greatest police escort I’ve ever been a part of. She’s buried next to my uncle, only a few miles away from where I teach. I think about visiting but have yet to do it. The grandchildren and great grandchildren are spread out all over the East Coast. None of us had the chance to know them. My grandfather deserted my grandmother and never looked back. My father helped them get by for a time.

Dad circa 1960

We would always tease my dad because he dressed like a gangster. The most ubiquitous accessory was his dark sunglasses, that he would even wear inside the house at night. He’d fall asleep in front of the TV with them on and we wouldn’t know until he began snoring. It was only later that he began telling me stories about his days in the union in Cuba, when he’d worked as muscle, driving the communists out and whatever else needed doing. The most common phrase in those days was, “you don’t want Wilfredo to come down here.” In the States he got mixed up with the counterrevolutionaries, planning the Bay of Pigs and trying to invade Haiti. I recorded whatever he’d tell me as my wife listened and ate breakfast on an infinite number of Saturday brunches in first Chelsea, then Union City, the heart of the old Cuban community in the Northeast. She’d later say, “theirs only three things I could understand from your father’s Cuban accent; armas, drogas and the Bronx.”

Dee's Bible

I can trace my family back to two mysterious figures. On my father’s side there is the Cantonese coolie, who was most certainly shanghaied into indentured servantry; lucky to survive and find freedom. With no Chinese women to marry in Cuba, he chose a mulatto wife, and his grandchild was my paternal grandmother. For a while we thought there was some Irishman in our past, because her family’s name was O‘Reilly. Later we found out that they’d changed the name to the street they lived on, since no one could pronounce Yung. He’s buried in the Chinese cemetery on the outskirts of Old Havana. On my mother’s side they go back to an orphan, whose unwed mother must have had a family-of-means, because they left him an inheritance to use to become whatever he wanted. He chose to be an attorney and a rancher. Sadly, the family lost pieces of the ranch to the first Cuban Revolution and poverty, drinking and gambling away what was left, until all they had was a butcher shop which my maternal grandmother lost when my grandfather died, leaving her with four kids and not much else. What the page of my sister’s bible does not show is the legacy of trauma, violence. womanizing and alcohol that made for a very dysfunctional family. Every name has a story and we have spent years trying to get the facts. My parents only cooperated near the end, after slowly tiring of keeping so many secrets.

Essay for A Pandemic Picture Show

One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that it is hard to find people to talk to about photography.  Certainly, many folks can speak about pictures from their own knowledge of life and art, but there are not many who share a common language gained from study and practice.  So, when my former professor, Bill Maguire, invited me to attend his online photography class via Zoom at the height of the pandemic I agreed.  I was looking for something to motivate me to make work.

F.I.U.’s photography program has a modest profile, its pedigree is solid, yet geography and the coastal centric art worlds of LA, SF, and NYC tend to get all the attention.  Its story begins with Maguire’s decision to study photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago in the early 1970s after having abandoned the teaching of literature and composition. The high points of his first year were the visits by Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, each offering a foil to ID’s aesthetic. He returned for a second year based only on a rumor that Winogrand would be coming as a visiting instructor.

In Winogrand’s classes Maguire silently absorbed his phenomenally passionate words and ideas about photography, his thoughts about the works of photographers who were really photographers, Atget, Evans, Cartier-Bresson, Weston, Frank, and many others. Winogrand turned him on to the photo documentary style that was most classically championed by the late curator of the photography program of the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski. In February of 1972, Maguire began to photograph at night with his Leica to see, as Winogrand said, what the world looked like in a photograph. 

 Bill returned to his home in Homestead, Florida. In August 1975 he began teaching photography at FIU.  He brought many of the medium’s great practitioners, such as Lee Friedlander, Henry Wessel, Tony Mendoza (who taught at FIU) and Winogrand himself, to share their knowledge with the FIU photography community.  The program would go on to produce its own greats, like Ed and Mirta Del Valle, Teresa Diehl, Tony Guilardi, Renee Cooley, Patti Reiff, Peggy Levison Nolan, Priscilla Forthman, Rolando Del Pezzo, Abner Nolan and Toni Chirinos, many of which would become professors themselves in their own programs and influence and teach many practitioners still to be known.  The crowning achievement pedagogically for the program was when John Szarkowski spent a semester teaching at FIU in the early 90s.  Known as “the shark,” he taught both photography as a practice and its history.  The influence of his tenure at the university lives with the program still.

The question becomes, why this little program and why is its impact so clear on photography.  The first answer is elementary; Bill found the perfect marriage between teaching students the skills necessary for making good pictures (an understanding of exposure/development and their effects on the form of the picture, the language of photography, detail, frame, time, vantage point, and the power of the photograph to be a representation of the thing photographed, itself) and a deep understanding of the photographic tradition over the course of its almost 200 year history merged with the importance of being able to write and talk about pictures as a way to understand them.  The second answer can be seen by the numbers of students who not only go on to get their terminal degrees across the country, at some of the top graduate programs, such as Yale, California College of the Arts, San Francisco Art Institute and FIU itself, but also the fact that so many of FIU’s graduates continue to make pictures for the rest of their lives, the mark of true success in art teaching, as per Richard Benson and Tod Papageorge, two of the great professors of Yale’s School of Art Photography Program, where FIU has consistently placed students in the last four decades.

So, when I first began to attend the Zoom sessions, I was not sure of what to expect.  I quickly found myself caught in the life-or-death struggles of ideas that I had experienced over thirty years ago in my FIU intermediate photography class.  Photography is a simple practice, as Henri Cartier Bresson said, "(It) doesn't take much brains...it takes a sensitivity, a finger and two legs."  But what makes a photograph good is a question which must be answered again and again.  I spent many sleepless nights arguing the question in my mind after the many sessions which began on weekdays but soon settled into a Saturday afternoon experience.  I found myself angry at people I loved over the simplest of remarks, but that is art, it is hard to separate your work from yourself, so remarks about it will also hit you where you live.  Over time the group, that began with alumni and students, soon expanded to colleagues and acquaintances, because a critical mind needs work to keep it going and two hours of discourse can churn up anywhere from two to four bodies of work a week. 

It was my notion that we should put together a show, some performative act to encapsulate the experience that I was sure would end with the pandemic.  What began as just the existing cast of characters of our weekly meetings has expanded to alumni, we can still get a hold of and then some.  I had offered to turn the curatorial decisions over to Bill and Peggy Levison Nolan, but in their egalitarian way, they both asked the group to help choose the work, though as Peggy has said, “Bill and I trump everyone.”

So here you have it, the digital light manifestation of over a year of arguments and many lifetimes of work.  If it seems impressive, it’s because it is.  There is a lot of good work here and even if we do not all agree with the choices of one picture over another, it is the product of an embarrassment of riches in talent and great work, the “poetic uses of bare faced facts.”

Where we go from here? I do not know, but it has been one hell of a ride.  I hope it lasts.

Hugo Fernandez

September 2021

The Nuclear Family

My mother, father, sister and I circa 1964

This is a great shot of my family in one of the five places we lived for the first five years of my life.  Each one comes with stories of surviving hurricanes and our neighbors.  But this one, the last one, is the only one I remember. My father was not around much, but I'm sure my mother wanted to have a picture to prove he was there.  My sister didn't understand what he was doing in our lives.  He had disappeared when she was six, had never sent the money he promised to get her and her mother out of Cuba, and failed to create a life for them together in New York or Miami.  She had told my mother to divorce him more than once.  When he finally showed up it was to ask them to leave Florida for the Northeast; she complained terribly.   My mother had managed to save a little money to buy a house.  Now my father was encouraging her to spend it moving to New York.  "I'll pay you back when you get there,” he had told her.  I remember riding the train north, the story of things being stolen by the movers, and the first little apartment we lived in in Corona, Queens.  But my father never paid her back.  He barely gave her enough for us to live.  The happy family in this picture would go forward to live through some of the worst years of their life.