John Deamond / Sources

Jose Manuel Fors is a member of the second generation of Cuban photographers since the Revolution, which focuses on the continued reclamation of personal histories and mythologies. His art takes the form of grids of photographs, stressing the mundane, repetition, and age. Though his art is very personalized and insular, it functions as a microcosm for his entire cultural experience.

Post-Revolution Cuban photography can be subdivided into three generations, which stray farther from revolutionary ideology into the conceptual realm. The first generation, emerging immediately after the Revolution fully took hold, continued in the style of bold, heroic representations that was popular before the Revolution. The main difference is that these new photographers favored images of the new revolutionary hero, the common man, instead of Che and Castro (LACMA).

The second generation, which Fors belongs to, exhibited a total break with this tradition, instead focusing on domestic realities of life after and as a result of the revolution. They work with manipulated imagery, avoiding pure representation. The personal history of someone who has grown up on both sides of the Revolution meshes with the collective attitude of a people adapting to a changing world (LACMA). The imagery of this generation “borrows from a pervasive Latin American magic and realist impulse expressed through an Afro-Cuban cosmological vocabulary” (LACMA).

The third, and current, generation is a group that has never lived in a pre-Castro Cuba, so has no physical experiences with which to compare their post-Revolutionary experiences. Consequently, though they continue in the same topical vein as the second generation, they extend their meditations from simple exposition of the mundane to reflections on personal and conceptual space. They work in a much larger arena and take part in an international art discourse, as well as expanding their media at whatever rate technology allows (LACMA).

As for Fors himself, he focuses his art on his own life and family, searching for an internal culture that consists of his whole set of habits and knowledge (MNCP). This ends up creating a microcosm for his total culture, sometimes even extending beyond that into semi-universal ideas. For instance, in “Cruz de Hojas,” a repeated image of a leaf in a cross pattern (Giluliano), he finds a form prevalent in our culture, closely connected with personal and family memory, a constant image from time we are born (MNCP). Fors says that memory is the main reason for his work and his main obsession (MNCP).

Fors’ imagery consists of personal subject matter arranged in a formal presentation. He uses rephotographed images from his family’s albums and pictures of objects like knives and shells, weathering, tinting, staining and scratching them until they seem old and fragile (Giluliano). His standard grid format, mathematically rigorous and emotionally cool, contrasts with his warm personal history. However, though these images are autobiographical and retain a sense of the cultural climate that produced them, they are in no way a complete personal history (Giluliano). This reflects the fractured and faceted aspect of lives that spanned the Revolution, as does the repetitive nature of Fors’ work. The grid of minor variations on the same few images functions as a sort of mental snapshot (Giluliano), cataloging the change of our perceptions through time. This is enhanced by the frequent juxtaposition of originals and copies in same image (Giluliano), revealing both changing memory and artistic processing. Because memory and meaining of an image are what make it important to him, Fors will reuse an image in many artworks (MNCP), reaching further toward a sense of fluid time by creating lines of similar works.

Jose Manuel Fors is a man of his time, but he still retains the Revolutionary idea of purpose. Though his works are personal and introspective, they send tendrils out into the world, realting his life, and all our lives to common ideas and purposes.