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, but the nearest house was so far away that one could grow weary walking to it. Unless it was through a battery-powered radio, neither my parents, nor my siblings, nor I could easily speak with anyone outside the family. That is why we valued visits so deeply—even those from strangers.

One afternoon, Leonardo arrived. At the time, we neither knew his name nor the purpose of his visit. He asked permission to dismount from his skinny beast and step onto the porch. After drinking two glasses of water, he said tersely: I am a photographer, and I travel through the region taking pictures for anyone who is interested. I had, of course, seen photographs before, but I had never stood before a photographer. I believed then that he must be some sort of magician—because otherwise, how could he leave someone, or a moment of someone, fixed onto paper?

My mother dressed us in our finest clothes, combed our hair, powdered us, even dabbed us with perfume, while Leonardo returned to his beast and brought back a pair of deep saddlebags. Seated on a broad stool, he removed a device we did not recognize. An old Kodak 120 camera, which would later become, in our eyes, the fundamental apparatus of his magic. He placed us tightly together, one beside the other, looked at us through the device, and a dry click was heard. That’s it, he warned us. What we did not like was learning that the photographs would be delivered the following week; we had assumed they would appear instantly, like the oft-mentioned rabbit pulled from a hat.

Anxieties aside, the man returned, and indeed, there we were—wearing the clothes of that day, with the ravine and a strip of brush behind us, our faces governed by smiles and bewilderment. After that, Leonardo returned frequently, and as there was little money, my mother sometimes paid him with eggs or chickens. Many years have passed, and the photographer has never ceased to strike me as special and enigmatic—someone who suddenly hands us fragments of our own lives and, more often than not, draws our attention back to ourselves.

For days now, I have been looking through, entering and exiting the personal documents of Pedro Abascal, and increasingly I recover that childhood wonder with which I witnessed the first photograph Leonardo took of us. From that wonder, I strive to uncover the keys to Abascal’s art—which is not magic, but the conjunction of accumulated wisdom and the gifts bestowed upon him by his gods.

Just a handful of photographs, drawn from the immense number Abascal has taken over the course of a decade. Perhaps those that have best served him in offering a spiritual portrait of himself. Images that always reveal him in motion through Havana—that powerful character—constantly vibrating through its objects and its people. Man and camera as an indispensable additional limb, passing as if by chance, arriving suddenly, entering unannounced, in order to find the human being within the daily ordeal of living and to leave them inscribed within the territory of dignity.

Abascal manages to capture the unreal appearance of the everyday, or to make us understand that in the succession of one day after another, habitual human actions and familiar settings can assume an expressionist projection that reveals their essential meaning.

The photographer has taken his profession as a way of life, and does not concern himself with endlessly stuffing his satchel with strange faces and bodies merely for the pleasure of hoarding the unknown. Through the successive neighbors who make up the body of his personal documents, Abascal has assembled the puzzle of his past years, his present hustle, and the unforeseeable to come—without omitting the final tram stop. The place where we all disembark, definitively silent in the depths. Yet without attempting to seize his chance harvest, one must point out what he surely already knows: these same photographs, through their rich attachment to reality, also function as a proposition—inviting anyone who looks at them to know themselves a little better.