Over a span of about 25 years, every time I had the chance to take a serious break, I immersed myself into developing my craft of documentary photography - I loved it - it was my window of time to get lost in story and process.
Though it was 21 years ago, I have a body of work that I'm still very proud of and would like to enter, as well as get the critique offered through this submission. I was shooting 35mm black and white film, and traveled with a documentary photography workshop to Cuba for the month of January 2002, shortly after 9/11. I mention the timing because it matters. Everyone in Cuba had watched on television the horror of that day in the US, but none of them could reach out by phone, mail or email to anyone they knew in America to tell them how sorry they were or to check on their well-being. This timing opened doors for me that would not have been open to tourists or photographers except for the fact that people wanted me to mail something for them when I returned to the US, so they offered to do things like give me a 'behind the scenes' tour of the National Ballet of Cuba, or invite me into their homes for coffee, or to see how their dogs lived inside their homes vs. in the streets. In addition to this unique timing, we had another experience that influenced our process: we lost our lab 3 days after we arrived, so our film was processed in local photo labs, often returned with scratches. I've never removed the scratches -- it's part of the story.
