The Final Escape of Chinolope

October 28, 2021

Anyone would have wanted him eternal for being who he was, one of the indispensable characters in Havana's fables, and in some way he had already conquered eternity. Now, last Wednesday, October 27, he has just passed away, at 89 years of age, Chinolope, the artist, the photographer, genius and figure who in his birth certificate arrived in the world with the name Fernando López Junque.

Every epic has its counterpart in those other characters and settings that pass before our eyes as if nothing and, nevertheless, constitute signs of the same era. Alongside those volcanic and hair-raising images that accounted for the triumph and rise of the Cuban people to the height of their destiny, others no less eloquent coexist to reveal to us the mysteries of an identity and the unique density of island space.

Those are the ones Chinolope has bequeathed to us. I said it before and I confirm it today. I know that by particularizing the importance and relevance of his work within the discursive body of Cuban Revolution photography, I run the risk of appearing irreverent, because the artist, by himself, was one. The wanderings of el Chino, whether true or false, told from mouth to mouth or by means of literature, nourish the myth of a wandering life and an artistic vocation that, if it were not for the definitive proof of the photographic frames provided, would be open to doubt.

At this point, those who did not know the character might believe that Chinolope is an accident in the history of photography, when, in truth, it is impossible to dispense with his contributions.

A single achievement would suffice to place Chinolope in the Olympus of our great lens artists in the second half of the twentieth century: his photographic essay Season at the Sugar Mill. With a prologue by José Lezama Lima and after sleeping a long sleep in the fateful editorial mattress (line of books awaiting publication in Cuban publishing houses of the 70s), the book was a revelation in the 80s and still continues to cause admiration among specialists and audiences from various countries. Each image from this essay presents itself to us as an act of faith in the baroque nature of the gestures and landscape that is common to us.

Season..., however, is not the only work, although perhaps the most coherent, that gave Chinolope the title of greatness. Between the 60s and 70s he harvested through portraiture, capturing Cortázar and Lezama, Virgilio Piñera and Roque Dalton, Víctor Manuel and the no less illustrious Varilla, from the Bodeguita del Medio.

This has been said regarding the works that remain. Like the one Seix Barral used for the first edition of Three Trapped Tigers, by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a photo in which the musicians, masters of the night, don't know if they sing, play, or simply tear themselves apart. Or that other one in which a girl crosses a stained glass window in Old Havana and looks like an angel. Or that one in which it occurred to el Chino, for the magazine Cuba, to pursue the Knight of Paris even in sleep.

How many photographic frames we must have lost among rolls filed away and cameras lost by chance, through the work and grace of Chinolope. Nobody knows. For now, there he sits, between Lezama and Cortázar, on the porch of El Patio, of the Cathedral. Reminding us that although, as he said, reality has no style, style ends up imposing itself in the philosophy of an image maker.