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Alejandro González

Born in Havana, Cuba in 1974, Alejandro González learnt photography in workshops directed by photographers like Diego Goldberg, Luis Gonzalez Palma and Edgar Moreno. He later won a residency at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, in Germany. In 2009 he was awarded the Cuban Casa de las Americas prize in the photography section. His work has been exhibited in Cuba, as well as Mexico, the United States, Spain and Italy.

González envisions photography as necessarily documentary. Even more so today, at a time when he, like the rest of his generation, is watching the world he was promised as a child disappear, and witnessing the emergence of a new generation completely different from his own.
So he documents. Not by waiting for the world to come to his camera – he admits to being unable to capture that Cartier-Bresson "decisive moment" – but by building rigorously thought-out, meticulously edited series. He doesn’t produce very much and each series is followed by a break devoted to preparing the next one.
Using a muted-tone approach, González observed plants rescued from concrete, clinging onto crumbling walls, emerging laboriously through asphalt, as a metaphor for a complex day-to-day life. Then, borrowing his aesthetic from 1970s Soviet magazines, he revisited his city, from Lenin Park to the monumental embassy of a country that used to be Cuba’s brother – a world intended as a foretaste of a Socialist victory. Nowadays nothing works anymore; rust and weeds have taken over the dream. Fortunately, however, a few families come on Sundays to picnic. Perhaps this is why a younger generation has appeared on the Malecon – the seafront in Havana – eager to invent a new nightlife, complete with American baseball caps, t-shirts and skateboards, atypical styles and energy to burn. González captures them in square frames, using a flash, creating a gallery of effective, truthful, non-judgmental portraits.
He does not wish to judge, only to document: which is what he did with the gay community in the series he is presenting at Photoquai. On 17 May 2008, during the second Cuban celebration of the International Day Against Homophobia, he shot thirteen tightly framed colour portraits of homosexuals and transvestites. One month later, on the openly gay beach Mi Cayito, he watched the first Gay Pride participants play before his lens, under police surveillance.