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Picture this
Cuban-born, American-educated photographer Tony Mendoza focuses on his life, his art, and the politics of his two countries
BY EILEEN KENNEDY

Tony Mendoza bought his first camera when he was 11.

It was Havana, 1952. The young dark-haired boy lived a charmed life in a comfortable middle-class house by the sea, surrounded by extended familia and the stories they shared.

Just seven years later, a young lawyer and revolutionary named Fidel Castro would triumphantly enter his city and turn the 17-year-old’s world upside down.

Mendoza’s family entered the stream of middle-class exiles who fled their country and landed in Miami in 1960, at the dawn of another revolution — this one countercultural — that would rock Tony Mendoza’s world yet again. At 18, he headed northeast to Yale and Harvard, and in 1964 landed in a stoned-out, free-love commune in Cambridge. He continued his academic career, this time in architectural studies (he’d already gotten an engineering degree), but his camera and his passion for taking pictures were always with him. By 1973, the once traditional Mendoza had become politically and socially "radicalized" in communes where "the neighbors were especially attractive," and he finally allowed himself — "to the dismay of my creditors and relatives," he says with a wink — to turn full-time to pursuing photography as art.

It’s a textbook story of how, if we pursue what we love, the rest will follow. Success has come to Tony Mendoza. He’s exhibited and published widely, received numerous awards — including three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and a Guggenheim Photography Fellowship — and his work is in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York City. His five books include Cuba — Going Back (University of Texas Press, 1999), Stories (Pub Group West, 1987), and the acclaimed Ernie: A Photographer’s Memoir (Consortium Books, 1985), which critics hailed as the standard for the genre. Ernie, the two-year old feline whose portrait graces the book’s cover, became an instant pop icon.

Currently teaching photography at Ohio State University, Mendoza spoke recently of Cuba, his art, and, inevitably, the US embargo of his native country and the upcoming US election. His autobiographical "Stories" exhibition, featuring photographs and accompanying text, opens August 20 at the Schoolhouse Galleries, in Provincetown; the affable Mendoza will be there for the show’s opening night.

Q: If, as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, why did you become interested in adding words to your pictures?

A: I got interested in using text possibly because I was always a little dissatisfied with what photos could communicate. Photos are open-ended and can be interpreted in a million ways. A person looking at a camera says nothing about that person — only what they look like, how old they seem to be, very much the surface. Adding text, stories, seemed natural to me.

Q: When did you first start adding stories to your photos?

A: In the early ’70s, I was showing my work to art directors in New York City. One of my favorites, a picture of my abuela [grandmother] — everyone loved that image. One day I went home [to Brooklyn] and wrote down the story I wanted to tell people about her.

When you show photos, there is always a story attached; it’s never silent, and then I began adding those stories.

Q: You were already 18 when you came to the United States. How has your Cuban background influenced this work?

A: I grew up in my father’s side of the family ... and his side loved to tell stories. It was routine after the day was over to get together on a big porch [on my grandfather’s former sugar mill] and everyone would tell a story. Men told stories, and women, too. My family was very Americanized with "highball hours." Everybody drank "highballs" and would tell stories. We admired them. The highballs helped. My father and uncles were especially good. Bonuses were given for the best story ... [which] tended to be funny, instead of literary — a very Cuban thing. I’ve never thought I was ever as good telling funny stories as my father and uncles. It never occurred [to them] to put on paper, make money with them. I always thought if I could do that, I would put it down and make money.

Q: You came from a relatively traditional background in Cuba; what was your time in the ’60s counterculture in Cambridge like for you?

A: I had a good life in Cuba ... idyllic for a child. I lived in a house by the sea, but then all that stopped, and I landed here. At Yale there were a lot of interesting people my age, pretty smart and accomplished, and it started changing me. Yale was very straight, to the right. I was not thinking too much on my own, and then I landed in Cambridge, and it seemed everyone was as far to the left as they could get. Instead of getting into arguments, I noticed that many neighbors were very attractive women, so I decided to join them ... and enjoy my new liberal image.

 

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Issue Date: August 20 - 26, 2004
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