captured Landscapes - Cuba, New York
An art-documentary project of photography and jazz
Human stories are like mirrors. If you line them up facing you, with their sides touching each other, you end up seeing yourself only in the one mirror right in front of your eyes. But if you line them up facing each other with you standing in the middle, you will see myriad reflections of you on all sides. Ildi Tillmann
Captured Landscapes: Cuba, New York is a multimedia project I am working on in collaboration with composer and jazz pianist, Elio Villafranca. We will combine the storytelling power of music and photography to reflect on ideology, propaganda, and slogan-driven communication, and explore their influence on human life in two contexts: Cuba and New York.
In an age of constant information flows, reductive sloganeering, and the proliferation of activism-inspired art and education in the United States, Captured Landscapes will encourage the audience to ask the following questions:
What is true, and what is it that is being marketed to us? How shall we know the difference, if our mental and physical landscapes are captured by clichés and slogans?
Captured Landscapes will merge artistic documentary-photography, written texts and jazz/Latin jazz compositions to offer a complex experience, and to create art for enjoyment and for education. The project motto a quote from Andrei Tarkovsky, a Russian filmmaker who lived and created during the Soviet era: "How can we really get to know each other? By abolishing the frontiers."
Our work will offer a perspective from beyond the North American paradigm, beyond a world of ‘identities’ rooted in race and gender. The project will encourage viewers and listeners to understand shared experiences within the flow of human history. We believe that accepting each other is not based on ‘celebrating difference’, but on recognizing that history and human stories mirror each other, and that they are rarely simply ‘black’ and ‘white’.
To donate to our project, please click the button below:
Background
The idea for this project came to me on a rainy evening in December 2023, in a cab, near Times Square. Protected from the downpour but slowed to a standstill by traffic, I had nothing better to do than watch the huge, flashing billboards that overlight - and overshadow - that area of the city.
Then my attention shifted to the tourists on the streets, moving in and out of the hotels, and to the food delivery workers on bicycles, braving the rain, busy trying to make a living. The difference between the two was striking: the people, real human beings on the streets were tiny compared to the advertising screens and to the aggressive messaging.
I took a few random photographs through the water-streaked car window, and the next morning I took some photos from the 15th floor of a building facing the square. When I went over all the photographs later that day, their dystopian message was impossible to miss. There were two, different levels to the space the pictures showed: the lower level of the street with people, and the upper level with flashing screens of advertising and news headlines. The lower level was insignificant compared to the huge, colourful billboards.
In the space the photographs showed, digital messaging and commercial propaganda overshadowed aspects of life I considered human.
While the area around Times Square clearly represents only a slice of New York, it felt like a striking visual metaphor for the world we live in. A world of advertising, social media posts and bottomless, simplistic news feeds. A world where slogans rule, where authenticity and complex thought are drowned out, if not outright punished.
First row of photographs above: Ildi Tillmann. Second row: sourced from Fortepan and Unsplash
…
Realities shaped by slogans are well-known to us who grew up in Eastern Europe at some point in the twentieth century. We know how such worlds are born and where they invariably lead to. We know it less through experience with commercial advertising, but from our history of authoritarian regimes, both from the left and the right of politics. We know it through our experience with forcibly politicized social and cultural spaces where ideology overrides liberal, intellectually diverse education, and it flattens creativity and the arts.
The photos I took on Times Square that day made me think about connections between my Eastern European past and the North American present. They made me wonder about the effects of propaganda on our consciousness - be it for commercial or for political purposes. Where does information end and propaganda begin? Does art necessarily end where activism starts? How can one not lose one’s way along this hazy path?
In my mind, I reached back to forms of refuge we took against the slogan-based external reality that surrounded us, Eastern Europeans. I recalled our sounds and silences, our images, our films, our theaters… our art. Rarely shiny, hardly ever glamorous, almost always personal. I remembered the importance of the private, the intimate, the individual. And I decided that the time has come to create a project. About the past and the present, about the importance of art in education, and about art as that offers refuge from the effects of the ideological.
Always attracted by multimedia formats and comparative contexts, I landed on the idea of a series of photographs and personal interviews in Cuba and in New York, accompanied by music composed to these photographic and interview archives. I knew that the best musician to work with me on such a project would be one whose music is both lyric and visionary, with a strong narrative character. I knew a person like that from a previois work: Elio Villafranca. I called him, described the idea to him, and I asked if he would be interested in working with me. When he said yes, Captured Landscapes was born.
What we want to create:
Ildi :
Two extensive archives of my own photographs from Cuba and New York guided by the project goals
A complementary collection of photographs and media material from archives in Cuba and Eastern Europe that connect to the project theme
Written stories and explanations to accompany the photographs. Presentations connected to the project.
Elio:
Composition of 60 minutes of jazz and Latin-jazz music inspired by the project material. The Cuban-inspired part of the music will take the audience back to the era when the revolution was still young, and it will trace its continuity to the present. The music for NY material will be inspired by American and other local ethnic influences (immigrant cultural influence).
Ildi + Elio:
Physical exhibition of photographs, live performance of the music at select venues
An online platform where the photographs, the written texts and the recorded music together will tell complex human stories and highlight the dangers that lie in blindly following ideologies
Elio Villafranca: Foundational to my work is the belief that music, and art in general, are the perfect medium to bridge cultural divides and bring people together as a community. In North America there is a tendency to divide music and art in genres and categories, to consider them in a form of isolation, rather than fluid or organically connected. With this project we would like to show that it is not only different types of music that ebb, flow and strengthen each other together, but also the narrative capabilities of music and visual art.
To view first Cuba gallery - click here.
To watch further teaser reels about our work, please visit this YouTube channel.
Captured Landscapes was honoured with starter financial support by the Shelby Steele Foundation. I was also given the opportunity to talk about the project in detail at an Institute for Liberal Values lab. Thank you for believing in us!
Bio - Ildi Tillmann
I am a photographer, essayist, and an educator, working at the crossroads of art, documentary, and commission-based photography. I was born and raised in Hungary, I lived in Israel in the mid1990s, and I moved to the US in 2000. I have a Law Degree from my native Hungary, and MA in Africana Studies from SUNY, Stony Brook, where my graduate research focused on culture and politics in the Caribbean. I started learning professional photography in 2019.
Working as an independent photographer and essay writer over the past years, my work explores the narrative potential of photography and art-inspired documentary. I like to unveil connections between people and histories where mainstream narratives would suggest that none exists. I advocate for mutual respect and understanding between people as individuals, as opposed to people assigned to - or signing up to belong to - politically convenient identity groups.
I have written essays for the Journal of Free Black Thought, The Columbia Journal, The Equiano Project and Root Quarterly, among others. I have won numerous international photography awards, and my photographs were exhibited in Barcelona and on Long Island, NY. I am a grantee of FAIR in the Arts, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, and of the Shelby Steele Foundation.
For media appearances, please click here.
Bio - Elio Villafranca
Born in Pinar del Rio province of Cuba, Elio is a classically trained composer and jazz pianist. He received his musical degree at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba in piano, percussion, and composition. Since his arrival in the United States, Elio has been working at the forefront of the music world, fusing classical, jazz, and the traditions of the African diaspora. Faithful to his Caribbean upbringing and cultural heritage, Elio’s music offers to connect, rather than to divide, whether musical genres or ethnic and cultural communities.
Currently based in NYC, Villafranca is a jazz faculty member at The Juilliard School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, New York University, and Temple University in Philadelphia. He is a Steinway artist, a two-time Grammy nominee, a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow and the recipient of various other prestigious awards. For full bio, awards, acknowledgements and to sample Elio’s work, visit his YouTube channel here.
An interview-essay I wrote for the Journal of Free Black Thought in March 2022 about Elio’s music, and Cuban, Hungarian and North American culture can be read here.