Montreal photographer shoots lesser-known subculture in contemporary Cuba | Canada Voices

The Montreal photographer Jean-François Bouchard has just published The New Cubans, a book of images exploring Cuban subcultures. Thinking he would challenge stereotypes of Cuba as a conformist Communist society, he sought out youth, queer and gender-diverse communities and asked people to pose for his camera. His photographs, often shot at night, show their costumed and tattooed subjects in heavily decorated domestic settings: a radical foursome pose in front of The Last Supper; a man in Spandex sits in a decaying Beaux Arts apartment. Bouchard offers a radically different image of an island long associated with beaches, cigars and vintage cars.

When did you first visit Cuba?

In the ‘90s, so long ago. I did go to Cuba many, many times over the last few decades. But it’s in 2016 that I started sensing something different, mainly because of the recent access to the internet. And it was only in 2019 that the internet became accessible on smartphones. That’s when I started observing how it impacted the youth culture. Younger folks for the first time could really see what’s happening around the world and they got inspired by that, stimulated.

What did you observe?

It’s a society that is not as uniform as people would assume. Most foreigners do not expect to find a thriving LGBTQ+ community under a Communist regime or a punk subculture or tattoo subculture, a drag queen subculture.

I wanted to show this less traditional side but simultaneously the economic situation worsened. My subjects were suffering and still are from the economic downturn in Cuba, the power failures and a host of other miseries that had the effect of creating a massive migration crisis. A lot of the pictures feel like souvenirs of lost friendships and lost loves: In the past two years alone, it is estimated that 10 per cent of the population left the island.

Among my subjects – I got around 300 people – my estimation is that a quarter have left the island since I started my project.

How did you meet these people?

I was following these various subcultures on Instagram and I crossed paths with a young woman, Devon Ruiz, an artist and a fashion designer. We hit it off and she became my key to this lesser-known Havana.

The settings are highly decorated, also quite dark and gothic. Is that the sitter’s choice or yours?

It’s a mix of both. Historically, I did a lot of work at night because I had a day job before I became an artist. I just became interested in what happens when the sun goes down. So that’s on me. But the decors in Havana are pretty striking. There’s a maximalist approach and people keep decorative objects for decades.

These decors are fairly frequent in old Havana and also in an area called Centro, where I shot a lot of these pictures. It is not staged in that sense. At the same time, we chose to create a contrast between the modernity of youth and traditional aspects that you can sense in the décor.

Sometimes we see Cuba as a place frozen in time because of the U.S. sanctions and people still driving around in cars that date before the revolution. It echoes that …

That is part of what inspired me; there is this frozen-in-time quality to Cuba. But at the same time, its citizens are very much connected with what’s happening in the world. And therefore very modern.

Are these people socially isolated or repressed in Cuba?

When it comes to LGBTQ rights, for example, Cuba is fairly progressive. There’s a high level of acceptance of personal lifestyles. The people I met who felt isolated, it’s because their friends or family members have left the island.

There’s no fear of persecution then?

It’s a cultural project that I’m doing, not a political one. It’s a society that is fairly open to lifestyles. Sometimes people confuse “expression” in the sense of free speech with expression of personal style.

So maybe the old stereotype of a party culture still holds?

It is a festive culture, but let’s not forget that this was about the younger generation. So they have more fun than we do.

The photographs from Jean-François Bouchard’s The New Cubans are showing at the Blouin Division gallery in Montreal to Nov. 16.

This interview has been edited and condensed.