How Juan Caballero looks at us

Juan Caballero does not drink water standing up. He also prefers to sit down to tie his shoes tightly. And he prefers the afternoon light: walking around Chinatown unhurriedly and eating at home very slowly. He prefers not to be noticed, that's what he prefers. He often manages to keep others unaware of where he is looking at them from, of the margin from which he watches, that angle he invents and in which he is uncomfortable waiting for a moment of beauty for as long as it takes.

One minute. One hour. One afternoon. Juan Caballero insists on staying. He insists on transferring the rhythms of the music to the forms of the image, although he wouldn't say that's what he does. He has been composing portraits for a little over three decades and documenting in photographs the expansive, tiny universe of Cuban rumba in New York for fifteen years. For Juan Caballero, the rumberos rarely pose, and the rumberas rarely pose. They tend to let themselves be felt without shame as only friends who bare their ills and passions do; as only those who expose their vulnerability for you to caress do.

We would like to think not, but a photographer is usually someone who disturbs, even if the aim of a portrait is exactly the opposite. A complicit gesture seeks the portrait and Juan Caballero has learned to invoke it: instead of disturbing as do strange looks that try to point where you don't want them to point, his is a look that serenades. A gaze that often probes without provoking prevention.

I saw him looking for the first time about twelve years ago, at one of those Sunday parties that happen during warm weather seasons, since the mid 60's, in New York's Central Park. I saw him and I remember him not by his face but by his pose: kneeling on a large stone, with his neck stretched forward like an alert bird, and his mouth slightly deformed towards the left corner in a grimace that, today I can recognize, is the one he wears as he holds his breath and prepares to press the shutter release button of his camera.

I did not approach him then or on other occasions when we crossed paths. I approached him a few months ago for an interview that he, and perhaps many others would say, I started very badly and continued worse, because after observing him photographing and before starting the conversation, I wanted to be his friend rather than just a journalist asking questions.

Juan Caballero carried a jean black with a colorful flowered sweater that girded her petite figure with prudent elegance. A camera without mirrors and a light lens hung around her neck, blue and brown glasses on her hairless head. From a corner of the Cuban restaurant where that Wednesday last fall the rumba led by Román Díaz was on, he watched the musicians doing their thing and every now and then he smiled. He watched and listened, from a corner. With no apparent intention of making space among the people who began to surround the musicians and restrict his view. No urgency to get in the way of anything that might capture his image in the decisive moment.

Rumba in NY. Photo: Juan Caballero

He could recognize very soon that knowing how to look from afar is one of his peculiarities; like approaching a few at a time, staying close to the lens for a moment, moving away without making noise. Peculiarity, I say, because while most photographers crave physical proximity to the subject, he often prefers that discreet distance and cultivates other relevant proximities. The complicity of dialogue, for example. The beers shared with the musicians around the corner of Allen Street and First Avenue: the rite that preceded the entrance to the space that up to six months ago was called My Kitchen Sauce and was a Cuban home for food, music and encounters between like-minded souls.

It was not difficult to long for closeness with the people you met there. I was taught -wrongly- that one does not do interviews to make friends or mix work with intimacies, or allow oneself to "seriously" love one's "interlocutors". They told me -they keep telling me- that private matters and what we call work are separate things, and Juan Caballero thinks that those who taught me are right. "Because you make such a mess if you mix things up. Because you wouldn't want to end up entangling issues from different pots." I say that it is absurd to approach others with so many predispositions, as if we do not love what we do or the possibility of not yet knowing those we will love.

He answers that maybe. He frowns, moves his mouth in a gesture that I can't decipher and reminds me, then, that he loves to talk to strangers. And that he prefers to talk to the people who daily sell you things on the street or those who have not accumulated degrees in anything nor describe themselves as experts in anything, nor professors, much less, please, academics and writers. That with the same rumberos, he repeats, is that he has learned everything he knows about rumba. "With the rumberos, above all, and not with those who write about rumba".

With those who were once strangers and whom he now portrays a little more as friends, he continues to build the visual testimony that matters most to him. If photographing strangers is often a violent act of extraction and surveillance that some photographers appease by doing their best to make themselves invisible, photographing friends is instead an act of love whose best reward is an instant of joy. Juan Caballero pursues that joy, but he also seeks to narrate other realities of the Cuban diaspora in the United States, as well as to include many of those who are not usually included at all, such as "the Marielitos".

Self-portrait. Photo: Juan Caballero

***

 Even in his day job, which requires him to make paint repairs at a large furniture store in the Meatpack District, Juan Caballero insists on striving for the impossible perfection: that there is no intrusive stain on the bathroom doors, that the staircases retain their shine and the colors of the walls maintain a certain harmony.

And that in his photography, invariably, there is only what is just right: that pure intuition, that subject in context, without any fragmented backgrounds.

This doesn't mean that I'm willing to use artificial intelligence or the apparent repairing - "unhinged, girl"- goodness of Photoshop. If anything, he blurs backgrounds or lowers and raises the brightness a bit. At most it removes extraneous particles from people's faces. But don't talk to her about lightening skins, or using the magic rejuvenating wand. Dead first, he says. Artificiality disgusts him. And besides, who has such perfect skin and such white teeth and such a cold heart?

He doesn't charge to take portraits, nor does he seek to be hired to take them. Like Cartier-Bresson, he thinks it is impossible to look the way someone else expects to be looked at, although he couldn't care less what the influential French photographer thought, which, by the way, he came to rather by chance and a bit late in life.

New York. Photo: Juan Caballero.

To portraits, on the other hand, he arrived early and first. At the age of twenty, and persuaded by a friend who worked in the laboratory of the Cuban photo library. They spent entire days walking around Havana -his hometown- with a camera, a portfolio and a light. They offered from house to house a series of portraits that they called "portraits". five faces and that it was a kind of collage composed of five gestures of the same person. "And because in Cuba, in spite of everything things have always been very different from the rest of the world, strangers did not act like strangers, they trusted each other, they let each other look at them with affection."

He says it in the past tense because he is referring to the 1980s, and because he has not set foot in Cuba for twelve years. Although this is how he experienced his first direct contact with photography, it was not exactly how he discovered it. He would say that it came later, when he went to live with a girlfriend in Buenos Aires. But it is also possible that the spell started where we usually start everything, in the heart of childhood and its unconscious inspiration for the future. His mother liked to watch the movies that were shown at midday on weekdays on television. Nor did she miss the History of Cinema presented every Friday. Next to him, the boy Caballero grew up watching the genius of Buñuel and Tin-Tan and Cantiflas and Kalatozov and Tarkovski without quite understanding why they mattered or what they would leave him.

Today, when he returns from his long walks to the apartment where he lives in Manhattan on the Lower East Side, he repeats and repeats scenes from those films. "And how did Kalatozov come up with that brutal composition in that very perfect contrast?" he asks. One afternoon we watch together a fragment of one on her phone screen: Mark plays the piano. Veronika looks at us with eyes of horror. War flies over the house. Missiles are falling and a few at a time disrupt it. She hits him in the face. And meanwhile, and meanwhile everything, the light, its shadows, its brightness, its whites, its absence.

Two sighs.

I had not seen before The Cranes are Flying And when I discover in Juan Caballero's gaze the enthusiasm of one who detects an accomplice to share a veiled treasure, I almost feel ashamed to accept it. But my ignorance only makes him more excited. "And how about this Orson Welles in The StrangerAnd of course you've seen Vertov!".

"If we're going to talk about influences, it's been film and not photographers and I like to think of it that way because I think self-consciousness about what we imitate or who we imitate inhibits creativity too much, it shuts down the gaze a bit, you know? I defend in many ways what allows us a certain ignorance".

Brooklyn, NY. Photo: Juan Caballero.

His first photographic exhibition took place in a small gallery in a café in the Finger Lakes, Upstate, New York, where he was working with a former partner on field crops. He didn't speak much English and an American journalist attending the show told her companion that they looked like photographs inspired by Bresson. That's how he learned about Henri Cartier-Bresson. And she didn't think it was a compliment.

She would be more flattered, perhaps, if we recognized in her work some spark of Vivian Maier. For her he has a special corner in soul and eyes. Above all because of what she did not want to be in life. "Above all because what moved her was an aesthetic passion for capturing, a need for images and not for fame." We only heard from her several years after her death.

Vivian Maier composed the poetry of her gaze, for many years, through a Rollieflex 3.5T. Juan Caballero still uses his Rollieflex -with a 2.8 C lens- very often and takes portraits of strangers in the street, which he then sends for processing but rarely prints. Sometimes he thinks it would have been good to take advantage of the lab courses he was offered in Buenos Aires, when he lived there from 1992 to 1997. He knows that they can't teach you to look but they can teach you to focus your gaze, to choose better and materialize it, but he often repeats to himself that he doesn't really like the darkroom at all. That his thing begins and ends almost at the catch. "And why insist, girl, on what you don't even like?".

Better to insist on looking where few people look, which could be next to your house, in any corner, anywhere that does not need to give you back a reflection of your own. Because if taking photographs once placed us in a kind of "chronic voyeuristic relationship with the world," as Susan Sontag said in 1977, when phones didn't take pictures and smartphones didn't even exist, today that voyeurism has been replaced by chronic narcissism. The phone's lens often focuses more often on the person capturing the image than on his or her outside world. It matters more how we see ourselves than what we see. And perhaps also to combat this morbid tendency, Juan Caballero invents self-portraits in which his presence matters much less than the surrounding space.

Cuba. Photo: Juan Caballero.

***

That I am not the first and I will not be the last, she says, who asks her with a tone of suspicion -auch!- how is it that she decided to return to Cuba just at a time when almost no one wanted to do so. That her father had died. That he felt the call of home. That it was a need of the spirit. But what they asked him the most, he says, was not if he had gone crazy enough to want to return, but if he had really eaten a lot of meat.

"Imagine you, that question containing the comic sadness of my generation."

But until then nothing, or almost nothing, of rumba in his life. There were no music lovers in his family. He and his brother were the rebels who committed the "terrible sin of consuming foreign music". No danzones or sones. What they liked was rock and rap and funk. They had a Soviet radio antenna installed on the roof of the building where they lived, with which they fished for frequencies from Miami. It worked divinely, he still remembers emotionally, until an employee of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution, resident of the same building, decided to take it down.

Rumba would arrive almost in its entirety, with percussions, mystery and glory, first through his childhood friend Pablo Herrera - today an academic, and rap and Hip Hop producer - who had grown up in a religious environment - Yoruba -, and later, then to stay, through an Argentine friend who would take percussion lessons with Pancho Quinto. Juan Caballero would begin to accompany his friend to the touches of sainthood with his camera, but he would rarely capture any photos. Perhaps, he now reflects, because respect prevented him from doing so, perhaps because he feared offending what he felt was truly authentic.

But sometimes he reproaches himself for not having photographed more in those times. Francisco Hernández Mora -Pancho Quinto- died in 2005 and was a person we would like to remember: founder batalero of Yoruba Andabo and one of those responsible for that rumbero style that -although it sounds more like an intoxicating drink than music- is named after the word "preciosa" (precious). guarapachangueo. "And Quinto was divine, like a teenager, always joking, always cheerful, always so wise."

"But don't tell me that rumba is Afro-Cuban music, girl. Rumba is Cuban music with African components, which is something very different. Rumba is secular and the only Afro-Cuban music is religious. Everything else, cha cha chá, son, timba, etc, is Cuban music, period. Putting Afro music before it only amplifies the discrimination it was intended to combat. And besides, it is a falsehood, like what they did with Machito's orchestra. Putting Afro to everything is also the gringada of labels, which in the end only end up discriminating more".

Lower East Side. Photo: Juan Caballero.

Many agree that the decision to put the word Afro-Cuban in the name of Machito's orchestra was an effective anti-racist and political action by its director, Mario Bauzá, but Juan Caballero will insist that it was not with the same conviction with which he insists that New York salsa is Cuban music, period. With the same conviction with which he accepts that yes, more women musicians are needed in rumba, but that does not mean that traditions should be transformed. With the same conviction with which he will repeat that there is authentic music and music that is not, and that the one he likes is the first one, one that does not welcome fusions, that is practiced but not planned, that is spontaneous and honest, like the trova, or the first son montuno or the bolero and, of course, the rumba.

It was in New York, however, where rumba taught him his own ways of discovering it. In New York, in 2010 and in Central Park, where he began to take rumba portraits with a Hasselblad. He had been living in the United States since 2000. Again love had dictated a course for her. In addition to working in the field and taking pictures for an agency, he became a camera repair technician and, later, when he moved with his daughter and partner for a while to Miami, he became a paint maintenance man in a hotel.

Of his brief stint in Miami, he speaks fondly and with nostalgic miajas about his long bike rides and his work as a photographer at Cuba Ocho, a friend's bar in Little Havana, where he shared with aficionados and musicians. He recalls having stopped seeing most of his old childhood friends because he didn't feel in tune with their homely and very monotonous or conservative lifestyles. His thing was, and always had been, the street, and in the street his people, and by his people he also means those whom many did not want in Cuba: delinquents, people with strong untreated mental illnesses, old men who spent the whole day playing dominoes, poor Marielitos - "and especially whites, because blacks did not come to Miami"-. They were those new friends with whom it was not necessary to coordinate meeting times. Those who were always there, present also in the rumbas that for a while were formed on Saturday afternoons on Calle Ocho.

Cuba. Photo: Juan Caballero.

***

The Central Park rumbas began only a short time after the massive Cuban migration to the United States due to Fidel Castro's rise to power but, curiously, it was not led by Cubans. Instead, African-Americans, Jews, Puerto Ricans and especially Nuyoricans organized the rumbas, which featured tumbadoras, but also cowbells, pailas, plastic bottles, and anything else that could serve as a percussive instrument.

Four decades later, when Juan Caballero began to frequent them, the rumbas were already being played mainly by Cubans and Nuyoricans and the music had a more particular sonority. Some would say that it had - or no longer had - the clave (clave atravesada). Others, that it seemed -or no longer seemed- a fusion alien to "the authentic". Many others, like Juan Caballero, would think that it was something lively, colorful, tasty and New York. He found it amusing to see the one becoming embronized with the other. Sometimes musically. Other times, in less prudent ways.

It was also fundamental -he thinks- that several of those rumberos who arrived with Mariel's exodus transmitted their knowledge to others and managed, among other things, that the batá drums became constant elements of the rumba. One of them, perhaps the most influential, was Orlando "Puntilla" Ríos. Other rumberos, on the contrary, did not even make music in Cuba, but when they disembarked in New York and became part of the Central Park rumbas, a few of them became an essential part of the phenomenon. And that is the most beautiful thing about rumba, reflects Juan Caballero: "The embrace that welcomes those who want to know and does not judge those who ignore".

"That's also why I portray some of them again and again and many times: because the interactions are changing, because each rumba is different from the previous one and the next one, and there are no end of surprises. Besides, it happens that everyone has their own day. So I pay attention to that, you see -Juan Caballero talks about them with an increasingly expansive smile- "Who has that special sparkle at a particular moment? Could it be Máximo, Rodger, Tito, Román?

Cuban percussionist and educator Román Díaz arrived in New York 23 years ago and, like Puntilla, has also been influential for the rumberos, but also for some jazzmen. Juan Caballero met him in the mid-1990s in Cuba, but only in New York did they begin to get closer. He does not remember where, but he does remember that from that moment on the connection was endearing. Román Díaz must be the musician that Juan Caballero has photographed the most and Juan Caballero must be the photographer that Román Díaz has shown the most.

Today, Román is a friend who opens spaces and paths for him to continue documenting both secular and religious meetings of Afro-Cuban traditions in which Román frequently participates.

Harlem. Photo: Juan Caballero.

In some of these meetings, which usually take place in private homes and are not of a sacred nature, Juan Caballero can compose photographs and film scenarios. In many others, such as those of initiation, he must not do so. He can be there: look, hear, feel, but never press the shutter of his camera and freeze in an image a moment of possession or, sometimes, devotion. These are the rules of the cults. He respects and understands them, but he is not immune to certain frustrations. No documentary filmmaker worthy of the name, I think, could be exempt from the frustration of not being able to document a story he knows to be relevant, intense, beautiful, and then not provide even a small piece of that particular beauty in the universe that breathes the future.

Only sometimes, however, does Juan Caballero think about futures. He prefers to focus on the present. Although when he imagines more, he repeats to himself that yes, he would like to return to Cuba someday. But to return with several cameras and travel the country from village to village so that the children of those villages can learn something about photography. Or at least they can learn how a camera works and discover the wonders it would do for their eyes. "It would be a perfect retirement plan, girl, because do you know how many little villages there are in Cuba? I could die doing just that."

That's all.

Nothing else motivates him to return.

Miami. Photo: Juan Caballero.