After graduating as an agronomic technician in 2012, Jordan Issell López Martínez (Havana, 1994) discovers that there is a different way of looking at the environment. Perhaps what is peculiar is not the unprecedented angle at which to place the camera, nor the relationship between diverse elements that, facing each other, weave a story in this or that photographic composition.
Perhaps the secret lies in the degree of attention with which we observe what surrounds us and we appropriate it and return it transmuted into work. The subtle and profound difference between looking and seeing, and the apparent paradox that leads us to affirm that one can look without seeing and, also, one can see without necessarily looking, since this last verb goes beyond the physical act of focusing with the eyes, is a network of actions that occur at the level of the intellect.
Jordan Issell looks and sees. He rides a bicycle through Havana trying to fix what memory could, with the passing of the days, bury. There is in his work the express vocation of not establishing a detectable difference between the viewing subject and the object of light capture. Whoever travels on the boat that crosses the bay, who examines a shopwindow that, however, displays political symbols, who goes to the reefs to explore the summer, is one more among many, an indissoluble part of the human landscape of Havana of this time, only, in the process, he shutters his camera, leaving testimony.
In 2017 he began working at the Factoría Habana Contemporary Art Center, of the Office of the City Historian. In this space he collaborates in the production and assembly of numerous exhibitions. Today he is a freelancer.
Although his training is markedly empirical, in 2019 he participated in the laboratory workshop Developing and Printing Techniques offered by the Department of Photography of the Faculty of Visual Arts of the ISA, today the University of the Arts.
Here he presents us with two of his series.
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Sui generis
(2017-present)
My vision as a photographer comes from my experiences. My aim is to capture problems that affect me as a social entity. I love the dynamics that the human condition generates, and the situations that it creates. Sui Géneris aims to explore the subject in interaction with his surroundings, based on images taken in different places, attempting to harmonize urban landscape and character.
Conceived as a visual diary, the series does not tell a story in a linear way, it only makes small sketches of moments that caught my attention.
Ciudad Jardín
(2022-present)
Eastern Havana is a dormitory city located on the outskirts of the capital. It houses 178,459 inhabitants, and its infrastructure exhibits a high degree of deterioration; furthermore, a high crime rate is detected there. An urban term as a title, Ciudad Jardín (Garden City), which emphasizes the self-management and sustainability of a metropolitan area, serves as a pretext for me to ironize the state of the place, which was once projected as the city of the future.
