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The Billionaire, Sin, and the Virgin

August 21st, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Three days after turning twenty-nine, on Wednesday, January 21, 1998, I carried out my first subversive act against Cuba’s communist system. I went to wait for Pope John Paul II. I went with tremendous enthusiasm. Probably with Gilma, my wife at the time. We positioned ourselves on the right-hand sidewalk of Paseo, between 7th and 5th Streets, in Havana’s Vedado district. We waited for about an hour and a half.

snapshots

The Bunny and the Predator

February 2nd, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

We have previously discussed how a photograph — or an image — can rearticulate the public perception of reality. How it can encapsulate experience, much like a verb does, rendering it transferable, exposable, and legible in a specific way.
Any story is a continuum, difficult to apprehend in its full extension and multidimensionality...

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From King Kong to Honnold: The Thin Line Between Stupidity and Existential Void

January 31st, 2026 | By Amalina Bomnin Hernández

Watching the American Alex Honnold perched on the skyscraper tower in Taipei—508 meters high—immediately carried me to the image of King Kong. With one difference: the latter has an intellectual author, the filmmaker Merian C. Cooper, who directed the original 1933 film alongside Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO Radio Pictures...

Art News

Esther Bell Appointed Hardymon Director of the Clark Art Institute, Becoming the First Woman to Hold the Role.

January 30th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

The Clark Art Institute is widely regarded as one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the United States. Located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, it has been devoted to the study and exhibition of art since 1955. The Institute uniquely combines a museum of the highest caliber with a leading research center—the Research and Academic Program—positioning it as an international point of reference for art historians, curators, and scholars...

Art News

The Astonishing Image by Edgar Su

January 29th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Edgar Su won the top prize at the World Sports Photography Awards 2026 with this photograph of Carlos Alcaraz in full action. Amateur Photographer, in its January 27, 2026 issue, reports the award and reproduces the image.
The photograph is titled Carlos’ Shadow Hits a Ball and was taken during an actual match. One could easily swear it was shot in a studio, so precise is it that it unsettles.

art review

Itinerant Photographer

January 28, 2026 | By Bladimir Zamora Céspedes

In his dialogue with reality—understood as an expansive living nature, and therefore never still before the artist’s pretensions—Pedro Abascal, who requires the road as much as the camera for his vital labor, has come to discover the possibility of drawing through the lens.
When I was a child, we lived in Santa Isabel, one of my grandfather’s farms. We were surrounded by trees, animals, and ravines. At that time, I did not know how to measure distance in kilometers...

Art News

Te Papa Turns Away

January 26th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

It is generally understood that national museums ought to be the natural custodians of their cultural memory.
Spaces where the history of national art is presented in an ordered and intelligible form. Where foundational images can still be contemplated. Yet, primarily for reasons of funding, an increasing number of state institutions...

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Nu det nok

January 26th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Perhaps since the beginning of time, yet within the landscape of contemporary visual culture, polemic, interpellation, and reply operate as devices of symbolic production that act directly upon the processes of meaning and the circulation of images. These controversies, or provocations—beyond merely situating themselves within a context that already shapes the imago—become structuring agents that reconfigure spaces of reading...

art review

Dossier Havana

January 23rd, 2026 | By Ibis Hernández Abascal

There are cities that return the gaze: they do not yield docilely to the frame, but rather address those who contemplate them. They demand a way of seeing that does not reduce, that does not foreclose. Havana, in this Dossier conceived by the Cuban photographer Pedro Abascal, appears as an entity that observes, folds, and tenses; it refuses to become a mere stage or backdrop.

art review

Dear Pedro.

January 23rd, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

I have known Pedro since 2004, perhaps even earlier, from the time I began attending the exhibitions held in the dozens of galleries and institutions of Old Havana. I do not remember how we became friends; it seems we were so before we had properly met. Pedro is one of the great Cuban photographers of the past decades. Some of his photographs would make Cartier-Bresson raise an eyebrow.

art review

Munch Was More Than a Scream

January 16th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Edvard Munch was one of the most finely tuned loudspeakers of his time’s spirit—the Zeitgeist. Dostoyevsky had been one before him, and Kafka would be another later on. He belonged to that rare class of human beings God seems to have assembled in haste—leaving the skull half-finished, the sutures open, the nerves exposed—those daemons of History chosen to transmit its message to humanity.

Art News

Richard Hoare at Messum’s

January 15th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Richard Hoare presents Edge of Light | Journeys Across a Frontier at Messum’s (London). From 7 to 30 January 2026, Messum’s (David Messum Fine Art) brings together a selection of recent works by the British painter, conceived along the Atlantic edge. The gallery frames this territory as a threshold: a place where sea and horizon blur, and light seems to force its way through skies that are dense, unstable, and perpetually in flux.

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No Innocence Required

January 13th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

Netflix aired the final episode of Stranger Things on December 31, 2025. It coincided with the closing of an unusual and demoralizing year. A masterstroke. We will remember forever the day the Upside Down arc was sealed, Vecna definitively defeated, and Eleven’s story brought to a close—at every level: her power, and her life in the physical realm...

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Without Pretensions—or With Them, but Always with Lux

January 13th, 2026 | By Amalina Bomnin Hernández

R10 has invited me to collaborate on his project. I understood that, in order to be attuned to the spirit of this community—eager to find a certain pleasure seasoned with a Creole inflection—one had to think carefully when choosing the subject, and also when attempting to share observations that would neither sound grandiloquent, taste of formula, nor resemble verdicts issued by juries...

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The Medallion Stays Home

January 13th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

The British Museum has launched a campaign to secure the Tudor Heart, an ostentatious gold pendant linked to Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. Its aim is to prevent the object from falling into private hands and vanishing from public view.
Discovered in Warwickshire in 2019 by a metal-detecting enthusiast, the piece was automatically placed under the provisions of the Treasure Act of 1996...

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Cold Bear

January 10th, 2026 | By Jorge Rodriguez

It is cold in Harbin, a city located in China’s northeastern reaches. It is the capital of Heilongjiang Province, on the banks of the Songhua River. Winters here are long and severe. Nearly three quarters of its territory borders the far—and frozen—Russian Far East.
One of the qualities I most admire in the Chinese people is their practical intelligence. They perform small miracles with whatever lies at hand...

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