1962-1982

I arrived in New York City in 1962 with my parents, my sister and a cousin after leaving Cuba as exiles. My father got a job as a Super taking care of five buildings on West 69th Street. One of them had to be heated with a big coal boiler which had to be fed manually. Winters were especially hard on my father but, all in all, we made do with what we had and were all fairly happy to be living in such a great city. For me, especially as a young immigrant, New York was a very important and instructional model showing the dynamics of power, change and ambition in this new country of mine. I knew then that we would never return to Cuba.

Soon after settling down I bought a Brownie camera with money I made at a corner pharmacy delivering prescription medications to people. Not all the black & white negatives from that time survived but here are some that made it and which I still like. Looking at these juvenilia has made me realize that photography obviously interested me pretty early on as a way to document and deal with the radically changing world around me. Walking around with this Brownie made me feel unique and individual in a topsy-turvy time of my life.

In 1967 I got a scholarship to attend Bowdoin College, even as my English was still rough and my academics were not up to par. I know that Bowdoin was taking a chance on me. At that time colleges began to recruit people like me to diversify things in their campuses.

My plan was to become an Electrical Engineer but after I flunked my first Physics class, I had to re think that dream, I was definitely lost. In the Fall of 1969, I took a photography course taught by John McKee who turned out to be a remarkable photographer and teacher. His way of teaching photography incorporated not just the technical side of photography but also how Painting, Music, Poetry and Literature related and connected to that medium. I adopted his approach in my own teaching later on.

At Bowdoin starting to make photographs in 1969 gave me such newly found pleasures and ways to have and use a voice that I wanted to do it forever. That feeling has never left me.

This is the time that I discovered the work of so many great photographers like Cartier Bresson, Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Josef Koudelka and many more. In many ways I wanted to be like them and some of these images reflect that.

Several years later I went to the Yale School of Art- MFA Program in Photography from 1979 to 1981 -several pictures in this group come from those days.