To shoot a great street photograph in Cuba is difficult precisely because of how easy it seems: the context is so distinctive and surprising that we could argue that photos already exist in real life there, ready-made.

The danger is to end up merely copying these living photographs…. Daniele Tamagni visited Cuba many times and never fell into this trap, avoiding the clichés born of the country’s myths and odd history. He managed to establish joyful interactions with the people he photographed by being his naturally spontaneous and empathetic self. His images generated a dialogue that maintained a thorny balance in order to avert the exoticizing gaze, which is about distance, not rapport… Cuba has been crucial to his work for two main reasons.

Cuba triggered his vocation as a self-taught photographer and was the starting point of his career. It also inspired a particular approach to image-making, conditioning his profile as an artist. An embryo can be detected in those early pictures taken in Havana between 2003 and 2004, announcing the direction he would then follow all over the world… Although uneven, his initial work in Cuba denotes a talented photographer, one gifted with a sharp sense of the image and keen to approach his subjects in a friendly, outgoing way. Some are very good pictures indeed, like the one portraying a boy with a kite framed by an aggressive wall spiked with broken glass to prevent trespassing.

The contrasts between the boy’s bared torso and the menacing glass, and between the open blue skyand the enclosing wall, are very suggestive……But the most meaningful aspect in this body of work is a sort of dialogic competition to command the images’ semantics taking place between the artist’s subjects and the Havana context, they’re immersed in.   

….. The pictures he took while wandering around Havana like a flâneur connote the inner ‘semantic competition’ that I referred to above: the one between the city’s fascinating environment and the people who inhabit it. The people won. Based on this ‘victory’, a free and dynamic portraiture would become the artist’s main subject throughout his career…

GERARDO MOSQUERA, Barcelona/ Havana, 2024, excerpts from” Daniele Tamagni Style Is Life” book .