Post by Katherine

“Doug’s photographs are perhaps best known for their stark black and white, snapshot aesthetic, and his fine-tuned sentiment for light.”

Meet Douglas Despres, international award winning American photographer based in Cambria, CA.

Hoo Yah!  Douglas Despres first emerged nine years ago as the staff photographer for The University of South Florida’s award-winning daily paper, The Oracle. What sets Doug apart is his quirky, humorous approach to photography, and to life.  He holds a Bachelor of Studio Arts Degree from USF, is an international award winning member of the Wedding Photojournalist Association (WPJA), an award winning fine art photographer, and serves as a special correspondent to The Cambrian newspaper.

Exhibitions of Doug’s photographs include Amnesty International’s ‘Wake Up World!’, the ‘National Summit on Cuba’ featuring Mikhail Gorbachev, and ‘One Community, One Book’ featuring Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz.

The bright take off into wedding photojournalism began eight years ago.  Doug’s photographs are perhaps best known for their stark black and white, snapshot aesthetic, and his fine-tuned sentiment for light.  He presses forward into the field with a certain joie de vivre, and seeks out peoples who make the ground of reality a wavering mirage.

One Island, Many Voices: Conversations with Cuban-American Writers, Eduardo R. del Rio (U Arizona P) $22.95

Despite the redundancy that labels its writers—though I do acknowledge that there are no current improvements—del Rio’s interviews offer a worthwhile exploration of culture and language in our contemporary literature. Following his insightful  introduction, a concise synopsis of the themes and concerns of contemporary Cuban-American writing, Rio begins his interviews with Pulitzer-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, whose thoughts on language are especially interesting. He says,

My first language is the Spanish language. I think and dream in Spanish. My thought process, the way I construct it, has very much of a Spanish sensibility. The way a Spanish person would speak. That’s something I try to capture in my language as a playwright. Sometimes it doesn’t make much sense in the English language, and I have to construct the sentence in a different way. It’s something that I’m very aware of as a writer. I’m very interested in capturing the cadence of Cuban people when they speak, but in English. I think the language itself doesn’t necessarily matter. What I’m talking about is a certain kind of sensibility that I try to capture in my characters. That sensibility contains the Cuban culture.

He goes on to discuss his attempts to capture that cadence in his work for the stage.

In his interview, Roberto Fernández, the novelist known for his comedic wit describes Cuban-American writers well: “We’re like chameleons. We can switch cultures. We can switch languages.” The rest of the collection, which contains significant representation by Cuban-American women, proves just that.

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Cuba: Art and History from 1868 to Today, ed. Nathalie Bondil. (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts/Prestel) $49.95

XXXA special thanks to Prestel  and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts for permission to use the images below.

A comprehensive survey of the last century and a half of Cuban art, Prestel’s mammoth paperback contains over 400 reproductions, ranging from Moisés Hernández Fernández class commentary untitled 1927 photograph of a horse sitting on a man’s back, perhaps riding him, while well-dressed spectators stare on, to Los Carpinteros 1999 grenade-shaped jewelry box. An especially interesting section catalogues posters of the 1950s and 60s: several trippy portraits of Che, others anouncing solidarity with Laos, Viet Nam, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, and Palestine, and Eladio Rivadulla’s trail of leafcutter ants accompanied by the text “Emulando Venceremos” (“Emulating We Will Win”). The book’s text is equally compelling, ranging from Rosa Lowinger’s sketch history of the Cuban club scene, from the 20s and 30s’ Sloppy Joe’s to Montmartre and Meyer Lansky’s Copa Room at the Hotel Riviera, to Ambrosio Fornet’s personal reminiscence of the 1960s.

Los Carpinteros
Active in Havana since 1991

Alexandre Arrechea
Born in Las Villas in 1970
Marco Castillo
Born in Camagüey in 1971
Dagoberto Rodriguez
Born in Villa Clara in 1969

Estuche [Jewellery Case] | 1999
Cypress, 225.1 x 129.9 x 129.9 cm
The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts | Purchase, The Museum Campaign 1988-1993 Fund Photo: The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Christine Guest

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Eladio Rivadulla
Born in Havana in 1923

Emulando venceremos [Emulating We Will Win] | 1960s
Poster Silkscreen, 81 54.5 cm
Collection of the artist

Courtesy of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana
Photo: Rodolfo Martínez, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana.

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Moisés Hernández Fernández
Spain, 1877 – Santiago de Cuba, 1939

Untitled, Santiago de Cuba | 1927
Gelatin silver print, 16.3 x 25.4 cm

Diaro de Cuba Collection, Fototeca de Cuba, Havana

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L.A. Theatre Works

This weekend, beginning June 20, L.A. Theatre Works will air its production of Anna in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz, starring Jimmy Smits, Adriana Sevan, Winston Rocha, and Alma Martinez. The broadcast can be heard locally in Southern California on Saturday from 10pm to midnight on KPCC 89.3 FM, and can also be streamed on demand at www.latw.org .

This poignant and poetic 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning play captures 1929 Florida at a time when cigars are still rolled by hand and lectors are employed to educate and entertain the immigrant workers. The arrival of a new lector is cause for celebration, but when he reads Anna Karenina to the cigar rollers, he unwittingly becomes a catalyst in the lives of his avid listeners, for whom Tolstoy, the tropics and the American dream prove a volatile combination. The broadcast includes an interview with Jimmy Smits.

L.A. Theatre Works’ radio theater series can also be heard on the following stations (check local listings for broadcast times): 89.7 WGBH in Boston; 91.5 FM WBEZ in Chicago; 94.9 KUOW in Seattle; 93.5 FM KRTS “Marfa Public Radio” in Texas; 90.5 FM KUT in Austin; 88.9 FM KUNM in Albuquerque; 91.5 FM, Interlochen Public Radio in Northern Michigan; 90.1 FM KKFI in Kansas City, MO; 90.7 FM KVNO in Omaha; 94.1 KPFA in Northern California; 91.1 FM KRCB in Sonoma County; and 89.1 KUOR in Redlands.

Major funding for L.A. Theatre Works broadcast series is provided by the S. Mark Taper Foundation. Founded in 1989, the S. Mark Taper Foundation is a private family foundation dedicated to enhancing the quality of people’s lives by supporting non-profit organizations and their work in the community.

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