After developing her signature practice of self-photography in Havana in the 1980s, Marta Marí

After developing her signature practice of self-photography in Havana in the 1980s, Marta María Pérez Bravo left for Mexico, where she has lived for the past 30 years. For many Cuban artists working in diaspora, the iconography of migration features prominently in their work. Pérez is no exception, though in her typically understated, poetic manner she uses her body to gesture toward potential narratives without ever explicitly invoking specific politics or histories. It is precisely through her body that these collapses of time, space, and symbolism take place—a body that resists as much as it adapts, as vulnerable as it is controlled, as potentially universal as it is definitively herself. In this image, Pérez becomes a boat, invoking perhaps the multiple points in Cuban history in which bodies traveled the seas, from the age of slavery to the untold thousands of emigrés who crossed the Florida Straits in the ’80s and ’90s. The title translates as “don’t capsize the lifeboat.” Importantly, the photograph figures the female body as the vessel itself, which touches on more universal themes of women as the creators and carriers of culture, knowledge, and memory, literally guiding each being into and through the world. What I love about Pérez’s work is how her grand themes and humble means resolve in a practice that is resolutely, exquisitely formalist. As she describes without an ounce of preciousness, “I sometimes find it difficult to find the image with which to represent my idea, but once I find it, it is that and no other: there are no alternatives. When I find the image, I prepare the conditions to represent it and to shoot the photo. There is no ceremony in all of this. No ritual or anything of the sort.”Marta María Pérez Bravo, No Zozobra La Barca de su Vida, 1995 -- source link
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