When the Obama administration thawed relations with the island nation of Cuba several years ago, there was a lot of excitement. Though Americans had been able to travel to the communist country under the auspices of cultural exchanges, the new policy provided an opportunity for virtually anyone to visit the Caribbean country.
The policy change led to an explosion of interest in Cuba, especially by photographers. The frozen-in-time nature of cities like Havana provided incredible fodder for photographers. They were often lured by the architecture and automobiles that provided a glimpse of what it was like to live in the country fifty to sixty years ago.
However, due to restrictions in travel and the nature of tourism, much of the imagery to come out of Cuba quickly evolved into its own sets of cliches; vintage cars, cigar-chomping grandmothers and peeling paints and political posters. As beautiful as some of those images may have been they offered little insight into the lives of the Cuban people.
Ira Block's new book, Cuba Loves Baseball: A Photographic Journey provides a refreshing glimpse into the lives of Cubans through their national love (possibly obsession) with baseball. Though popularly known as the American past time, Cubans have made the game into something that is unique only to them. As Sigfredo Barros writes in his preface for the book, Cuba is not the national sport. It is the national religion.
Ira Block who has produced over 30 stories for the National Geographic over his long career, took on this story as a personal project. His love of baseball and his desire to document the country's passion for the game spurred him to visit the country over several years. He wanted to document it as it was before changes in policy, capitalism and the influence of American major league baseball changed the dynamics of the game forever.
The resulting images are more than just a collection of action photographs. Instead, they reveal the varied ways that baseball is incorporated in the lives of the Cuban people. They not only include the lives of the country's young league players, but also the children playing in the street with nothing more than sticks and a "ball" made of little else but a rock, paper, and tape. Block also produced a series of beautiful portraits of older players who have not let go of their passion for a game they first played as children.
Block's eye for composition and his ability to produce beautiful layered compositions delivers not only photographs that are wonderful to look at, but images that provide insight into what it means to live and breathe baseball.
Elinor Carucci (born 1971) is an Israeli American photographer and educator living in New York City. She is noted for her intimate portraits of her family's lives.[2][3][4] She has published four monographs: Closer (2002), Diary of a Dancer (2005), Mother (2013), and Midlife (2019). She teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Shortly after RBG’s passing in September 2020, Time magazine commissioned Carucci to write a commemorative piece on the late justice, focused on the stories behind her legendary collars.
Barbara Peacock is a photographer and director living in Portland, Maine. Since having started American Bedroom in 2016, she has won the Getty Editorial Grant, the Women Photograph/Getty Grant, three LensCulture Awards, four Top 50 Critical Mass Awards, and was named one of the Top 100 Photographers in America 2020.
Nick Carver is a working photographer and photography instructor based in Southern California with over eighteen years shooting experience and a professional career spanning more than a decade. Although his teaching and commercial work hinges primarily on digital photography, his passion is fueled by a love for analog film and creating fine art prints. Nick has sought to educate, entertain, and inspire other photographers both in the classroom and through his YouTube videos.
Robbie Quinn is an award-winning, New York–based commercial photographer specializing in environmental portraits. His work, which has brought him to more than a dozen countries, speaks to current issues, including race, immigration, gender identity, and sexual orientation, emphasizing promoting diversity and inclusion.
Rachelle Steele is a Master Photographer based out of Northern California. She is most known for dynamic black and white environmental portraiture and her ability to fill a single frame with design elements of intense storytelling and passionate compositions. Her unique background brings depth and power to her images, communicating something from the eye, heart, and mind.
Joel Meyerowtiz is an award-winning photographer whose work has appeared in over 350 exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. Celebrated as a pioneer of color photography, he is a two-time Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities awards and The Royal Society’s Centenary Medal. He has published over 53 books. His latest release is titled. The Pleasure of Seeing.
Kirsten Elstner is the founder and director of National Geographic Photo Camp, whose mission is to work with youth from diverse communities worldwide, guiding them as they use photography to tell their own stories and develop meaningful connections with others.
George Lange is a photographer whose pictures have appeared in almost all major magazines, ranging from Entertainment Weekly to Esquire. George has shot advertising photos for many movies and TV shows, including; Seinfeld, The Today Show, Cake Boss, and Jim Carrey’s movies. Most recently, he has worked with Norwest Venture Partners, Twilio, the Richard King Mellon Foundation, and the Grammy Award-winning Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. George's new book, Picturing Joy: Stories of Connection, is a lively guide to George’s approach to life and the highlights of his career.
Michael Honegger is a visual artist born in Germany with a B.A. in History & Spanish from Duke University, a M.S. in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, and a Professional Certificate in Visual Arts from Maine Media College. His practice as a fine art and documentary photographer explores the performative nature of self-portraiture, the complexities of memory and family, and an investigation of the ironies of American culture with an expatriate’s eye. His most recent book is The Need to Know.
Barbara Mensch is a fine art photographer who probes her subject matter with the curiosity and stamina of a detective. Born in Brooklyn, New York, she began to draw at an early age, attending classes at The Brooklyn Museum Studio School and the Art Students League as a teenager.
James Payne is a social documentary photographer based in Los Angeles, California.
He is fascinated by how people interact with the places they inhabit, particularly in their homes and on the streets. He has been capturing images of both for decades. American Portraits (in 3D) are a unique series of environmental portraits that are rendered in three dimension using his own approach for showcasing these images.
Jorge Delgado-Ureña is a photographer and the co-founder of The Raw Society. Originally a commercial and fashion photographer, an assignment in Nepal opened up a whole new world of photography and inspired him to create The Raw Society.
Christelle Enquist is a photographer and co-founder of The Raw Society. She speaks four languages and was raised in Singapore; her curiosity about other cultures and passion for travel started at an early age, instigated by her mother and father. A 6-month solo travel at 33 awoke her passion for photography.
Sandy Sugawara and Catiana Garcia Kilroy collaborate on a book project titled Show Me the Way Home. It is an immersive, visual journey through the incarceration camps that held 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War 2. Sugawara and Kilroy tell the story of each camp through original and archival photographs, personal stories, and government documents. It’s a frightening tale of a society that failed to protect its vulnerable.
Jason Langer is an American photographer best known for his psychological and norish visions of contemporary photography urban life. Langer apprenticed with renowned photographers including Ruth Bernhard, Arthur Tess, and Michael Kenna. Langer is known for his fine-art black-and-white photography. His latest book is titled Berlin.
Richard Sandler is a street photographer and documentary filmmaker. He has directed and shot eight non-fiction films, including “The Gods of Times Square,” “Brave New York,” and “Radioactive City.”
Nina Welch-Kling is a New York City-based photographer originally from a small town in southern Germany. Her background in fine art and architecture, combined with a love for roaming the city streets, inform her photographic depictions of everyday life.
Raquel Natalicchio is a photographer from Los Angeles, CA, now based in Houston, TX as a staff visual journalist for The Houston Chronicle. Raquel documents social issues, community-driven stories, political mobilization, and migration across the US/Mexico border. Her work focuses on the universality of humanity, including themes of love, struggle, resilience, and community.
Bob Patterson is the founder and publisher of Street Photography Magazine. For the past 10 years, Bob has produced a magazine dedicated to showcasing a diverse range of street photography and documentary photographers. An early adopter of digital publications, Bob combined his savvy for web design with his personal love for photography.
Larry Niehues is a French-born author and photographer who immigrated to the United States in 2010. While working as a commercial photographer for a variety of brands and publications, Mr. Niehues has tended to his passion for motorcycles, music, and the open road, traveling intensively over the last seven years creating the images that compose Nothing Has Changed, a photographic journey across America that connects the present with the past in ways that make us contemplate our collective future. His latest book is Mississippi Dream.
Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind.