Una Corda, by David Creedon

As photographers we’ve all stumbled upon locations which make the heart race, the kind of environments where you could trip up with a camera and still end up with a good shot (in fact I did just that in Hungary a few years back, whilst belly flopping to the ground, camera in hand, I saw that I was about to loose the shot to an oncoming bus, so managed to keep the camera straight, I released the shutter and snapped a rather good shot, just prior to my elbow bruising landing). This seeking out and transposing of locations is at the heart of what so many photographers do, so I am in no way taking anything away from the David Creedon’s work, which does this with such aplomb.
Entitled “Una Corda” after the unique arrangement between Ireland and Cuba, where visitors from Ireland take piano pieces to the trade embargoed tuners of Cuba. Creedon visited and photographed the piano-tuning workshops in the heart of Havana, where once all the tuners had been blind, a communist matching of skills to ability that is unthinkable today. These images which imbue in me the kind of romanticism I first felt, when aged fourteen, as I looked at a small reproduction of ‘from the Back Window, 291’, By Alfred Stieglits, 1915, NY (right).

They transpose you to an almost mythical place, that were you able to visit, could only fail to live up to the beauty captured so precisely and soulfully by such artists as Creedon and Stieglitz.
David Creed sets out to illuminate a story about Irish compassion and the musical heritage of Cuba; but these images are far more than illustrations of an international pact, these depictions of deserted workshops speak of a different world before the iron curtain fell, of tropical sunlight and soulful musicians, who’s only presence is now to be found in handprints left in the dust.
This and other work by David Creedon can be seen here:
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