Pepín the Worker: a Legacy That Must Not Die

August 22, 2024

This Monday the world was celebrating World Photography Day and Cuba was saying goodbye to one of the greats of the lens. What a sad coincidence, but what a beautiful tribute to one of his most beloved creators.

José Antonio Medina, 'Pepín the worker' for the entire island, said farewell leaving behind an immeasurable photographic legacy. With his camera and with intense work from a very young age, he dedicated his life to capturing in images the most important cultural events of the island.

Pepín will be remembered throughout the country…in Havana, in Holguín, in his native Tacámara and in his adopted Santiago de Cuba. Outside the island tributes will also reach him because he was a man who let himself be loved and loved well.

Silvio Rodríguez and Omara Portuondo
Silvio Rodríguez and Omara Portuondo
The Karl Marx Theater was his home for more than 30 years, "practically half my life for me," as he himself said in conversations with Cuba Noticia 360, a medium for which he was one of its oldest and most constant collaborators.

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It was thanks to his work in the "Theater of great events" that Pepín was not only a witness to the greatest cultural events, but also left evidence of it in images and got to know multiple national and international figures who admire his work.

Joan Manuel Serrat, Fito Páez, Juanes, Joaquín Sabina, Geraldine Chaplin, Víctor Manuel, Johny Ventura, Pancho Céspedes, Leo Brouwer, Danny Rivera, Ana Belén, Benicio del Toro, Silvio Rodríguez, Paco de Lucía, Rosario Cárdenas, Omara Portuondo, Juan Formell, Frank Fernández, Pablo Milanés and Rosita Fornés, among many others, make up an endless list of personalities who passed through his lens to remain forever in that great photograph of a country that Pepín left behind.

Fito Páez
Fito Páez
Fito Páez
Fito Páez
Johny Ventura
Johny Ventura
Leo Brouwer
Leo Brouwer
Paco de Lucía
Paco de Lucía
Pancho Cespedes
Pancho Cespedes
Silvio Rodríguez
Silvio Rodríguez
This artist left his soul, took advantage of the light, knew how to capture unique images, but above all, he lived his years with love and dedication to a profession that for him was life itself.

Pepín had "the worker" added to his name because one day while reviewing his employment record at the Karl Marx Theater he noticed that that was the position they had assigned to him: 'unskilled worker'. That was the occupation he had at the theater.

Nevertheless, speaking with Fullframe magazine, he assured that he felt proud of it because "this 'stick carrier' worked with what is most valuable and brilliant in culture and many artists count on me to take their photos. It's not a usual nickname, but that's what I am, a simple worker, and why not?, I am a worker of culture".

According to what he said, he was the only one there who was a first-level graduate as a stage director, but despite the recommendations and documents that accredited his studies, that position did not exist in the theater. Pepín had letters from the Royal Ballet's stage director and from other foreign institutions, and to top it off, also from the best Cuban choreographers and directors, like Santiago Alfonso.

Fito Páez
Fito Páez
Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Chaplin
Pancho Céspedes
Pancho Céspedes
Juan Formell
Juan Formell
Frank Fernández
Frank Fernández
Johny Ventura
Johny Ventura
Leo Brouwer
Leo Brouwer
His work was not limited to still photography, but he also collaborated with some of the most important video clip producers on the island. Although Pepín did the making of photography for several of those materials, the theater meant too much to this "King of darkness".

"The problem is that since I live in the theater, I take photos from where no one else can take them. No photographer who comes from outside to the Karl Marx has the possibility of taking the photos I take because I take them from the most inhospitable places or from the ceiling, 14 meters high," Pepín told Cuba Noticias 360.

Pepín had a unique and incalculable arsenal of images. In his house there was barely room for anything else, the walls were full of photos. That was also his temple…the space where he treasured all those unique moments that for more than 30 years gave him his passion and the shutter of his camera.

Without saying goodbye, because images never go away, Cuba said farewell to José Antonio Medina Pérez and is left with the satisfaction of an island that had and will have Pepín, the man of lights and shadows, the owner of the snapshots of the greats on stage and, above all, the worker of a culture that should pay him tribute today and always.