Raúl Cañibano

Raúl Cañibano (Havana, 1961) is an award-winning photographer whose work focuses on his native Cuba. In his youth, he lived for several years in the rural provinces of Las Tunas and Cienfuegos before moving to Havana and training as a welder. It wasn’t until 1989 that he visited an exhibition of Cuban photographer Alfredo Sarabia’s surrealist photographs at the Fototeca de Cuba, which opened his eyes to the type of photography he wanted to do. Self-taught, Cañibano was influenced by a wide range of artists and photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Salvador Dalí and Sebastián Salgado, and developed his own “slightly surrealist” style. His work explores a broad range of themes, including the city, the countryside, faith, and old age. 

His ongoing two-decades’ long anthropological series “Tierra Guajira” (Country Land) won Cuba’s photography prize in 1999. It pays homage to Cuban peasants and recalls his own experiences of having spent part of his childhood in the rural eastern regions of the island. 

His photographs have been published widely (New York Times, Leica Fotografie International and Black & White Magazine, The Guardian, Le Monde, etc) and exhibited internationally. Cañibano’s work features in major public collections, including the International Center of Photography (ICP) and the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes. His latest book Absolut Cuba was published by Edition Lammerhuber in 2021.