TTBE Issue I - MALAK KABBANI

TILL THE BITTER END
ISSUE 3 – JAMES CLIFFORD KENT

These photographs were made in Cuba between 2005 and 2025. They belong to YUMA, my long-term portrait of daily life on the Caribbean’s largest island. 

The work has taken shape slowly, through time, trust and repeated encounters. It has unfolded in fragments and returns, in moments of proximity and distance. In a period of ongoing uncertainty for Cuba, I have stayed with what I have found there: openness and hardship, mischief and improvisation, faith and doubt, presence and absence. Rather than resolve these conditions, the work remains with them, allowing them to exist as they are seen and felt.

The title YUMA was given to me by the Cuban family who first welcomed me into their home. Cuban slang for a foreigner, it also designated a position: someone from afuera, learning how to look and listen. That position has never fully disappeared; informing how the work gathers and expands over time.

I have always understood picture-making as an encounter, a kind of dance, dependent on all these different factors: attention, rhythm and trust. Bodies in space. I am not interested in taking from people’s lives, but in being with them, and in working within their worlds as they unfold. In this sense, photography becomes a shared space: something made together, over time, with care and responsibility.

This way of working requires patience. It depends on close listening, on remaining open to what is offered, and on resisting the immediacy of the snapshot. I am drawn to the everyday and the overlooked: heavy atmospheres and slow rituals bathed in warm Caribbean light.

Through portraits, interiors, street scenes and elements of the built environment, YUMA traces a country that has shaped my way of seeing as much as I have sought to describe it.

This zine assembles a selection from YUMA as part of TILL THE BITTER END. Designed by Malak Kabbani, it gives the work a new rhythm on the page — intimate, precise and alive. I am deeply grateful for her sensitivity and her eye. Working with her has often felt like seeing my pictures again for the first time, as the sequencing opens up dialogues between the images in ways I had not previously imagined.

My thanks go to my Cuban family, many of whom have since left the island and now live in Spain and the USA, while others continue to navigate life in Cuba with extraordinary resilience. Thank you for opening your door to me and for changing the way I see the world.

This issue is dedicated to you.