It was a Colas brand camera, white, disposable, and with a single roll of film the first device through which the photographer Laura Capote Mercadal (Havana, 1991) looked at the world with curiosity. It had been given to her mother as a gift by the French company she worked for, and her mother then put it in her eight- or nine-year-old hands. With the Colas camera, she documented her first poses: little Laura standing upright in the house backyard in Guanabacoa, next to a dog, a toy, or leaning against a stone wall.
Although the Colas brand camera—now without film—was always in the family home, there is no direct connection between the artifact and the fact that Capote Mercadal has become a self-taught photographer, who learned from masters such as Chino Arcos, Ossain Raggi, or Juan Antonio Molina. The inclination for photography, she says, came by chance.
—Initially it was like a game to see what could come out. At the same time, it was always a mechanism for experimentation and growth.
For a long time, Capote Mercadal consumed a lot of photography, stimulated her gaze, trained her taste, accumulated folders of images. Robert Mapplethorpe particularly attracted her and marked her later work. “Getting to know his photos, reading his biography, was a discovery.” In 2019 the young woman settled in Mexico, the land of Graciela Iturbide, whom she admires and who “allows me to connect with the reality of the country” where she lives. Then, Vivian Maier showed her “the exercise of instantaneity, of going down the street taking pictures, which is something that for me is embarrassing but at the same time admirable,” she says. “I couldn’t do it.” One day he set her eyes on the creation of Cindy Sherman, “for her work with the woman’s body,” or Nan Goldin, “for the rawness of her images.”
Now she has just opened her exhibition Tramas (“Wefts”) at the Salón Gallos, in Mérida (Yucatán, Mexico) the first outside Cuba, a never-before shown and still in-developing show with ten photographs in which an image of braided hair is repeated ten times. It is the first braid Capote Mercadal has had cut in Mexico. But the clipped braid has always been there. She has been braiding her hair since childhood so that later someone would come along, prune it and it would grow back.
Let’s talk about your exhibition Tramas. What is the link between the braid and the body? Why this exhibition today, at this point in your career and life?
Tramas is a series of self-portraits where the braid is the protagonist. For me, it is a kind of ritual. I have kept the braids cut from my hair in my life. I keep two braids in my house in Cuba, including my first braid as a child; another one I had, I sold it. After almost ten years, this is the first braid I cut here in Mexico. So, I don’t know, it was like a ritual: taking pictures of that element that was part of me and, simultaneously, playing with it, incorporating it into places where it doesn’t belong on my body.
I remember perfectly when they cut my first braid and what it meant to me not to have it. When I was in third or fourth grade, my mom cut my hair so I wouldn’t be late for school, because she or my grandmother didn’t have time to braid my hair. Another reason for cutting my hair was so I could learn to do my hair. It was an abrupt change for me, from one length of hair to another, although I think I normalized it then. The way I see it, this project is a commentary on personal and collective identity. There are many photos of women braiding their hair, from Iranian photographer Hoda Afshar to Mexican photographer Flor Garduño, who braids a thatched roof. The process of making these portraits with the braid on different parts of the body plays a bit with the idea of the violence itself of the very act of cutting someone’s hair, with or without consent. In turn, as Michel Mendoza Viel, curator of the exhibition, would say in the catalog: “Braiding hair often symbolizes the union of separate elements or the effort to articulate lines of resonance between personal and collective identity. Similarly, cutting it can symbolize a significant loss, the imperative or emblem of a freely chosen transformation, or a form of subjugation.” I believe this exhibition marks a starting point within my career and a return in a general way to a part of my life. After having spent five years practically at an impasse of observation, trying to adapt to and understand the environment I migrated to, I have been able to reconnect with memories, sensations, and even symptoms.
You studied Information Sciences at the university and then did two master’s degrees, in History and Management and Preservation of Cultural Heritage. Nothing here suggests you had to pick up a camera, but maybe it did. How much of all this nourishes you in your work as a photographer?
Indeed, my studies do not point to the possibility of me picking up a camera, however, they have been directly related to photography. I started studying Information Sciences at the University of Havana in 2009 and, at the same time, when I was in the second year, I started taking pictures in a self-taught way because I had friends who were photographers. Information Sciences is a degree that is linked to different information systems and allowed me to think about photography—which I was already studying creatively—also as a source of information, as a document. I learned to describe it, to process it, to catalog it. I understood that photography could not only be read as a means of expression, but also as an informative document. These are processes used in libraries, archives, or museums to describe archival documents, including photography. When I graduated, I worked for five years as a Heritage Management Specialist at the Historical Photo Library of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana. I was exclusively dedicated to processing photographic documents that rescued the historical memory of Havana and Cuba. I learned about old photographic techniques, such as ambrotypes, ferrotypes, daguerreotypes, wet collodion, albumen, etc. That stage was useful to train me in the analysis and processing of photographic images and also to learn about the conservation mechanisms of photography. While there, I did my first master’s degree focused on rescuing the photographs that documented the construction of the Capitol of Havana. That led to a book project whose publication is still pending. It was a nice stage, I have many memories, it was a place where I really liked to work.
I emigrated to Mexico in 2019 and, in 2020, I started another master’s degree, this time in History, at the Colegio de San Luis Potosí. In my thesis, I dedicated myself to studying the work of Bernice Kolko, a Polish-American emigrant who was in Mexico from 1951 to 1970. She is a photographer I am obsessed with. My idea was to analyze the kind of national-Mexican imaginary she had recreated in her work and see how it was related to the photography being done in Mexico at the time. Practically, I got to know Mexico from the point of view of an emigrant. I try to ensure that what I study and what I do have a relationship, that there is a crossroads of perspectives, that what I know as a photographer contributes to the research, and that what I learn enhances the photographic exercise I am carrying out.
Women, spaces, silences, architecture, cities, bodies, shapes, silhouettes, why these searches? How did you understand or discover that this was your hallmark?
I don’t know if I would call it a hallmark, but they have been present in my explorations and triggered the possibility of exploring sensations, forms. In these explorations, I think I have dedicated some attention to the things that surround me, those that attract me unconsciously. I can be very absent-minded, but my process goes through certain places where I suddenly visualize some elements that push the creative button. Sometimes I see certain possibilities in a space—such as structures, lights, shadows—where I can compose, incorporate an element, be it a body or an object. I automatically come up with images that I can build in that space. These explorations are a little innate and are complemented in these spaces through which I can flow, through which I have traveled. For example, I traveled around Cuba and I found myself in areas or places where I saw the possibility of incorporating myself into the landscape or incorporating someone else, and from there I could create, take an image. My explorations originate more in the movement than in the static.
You are a little bit all that you represent in your photos: woman, inhabitant of space, of a city. If you look at your first personal exhibition in 2012 and then at this last one, how much has Laura Capote Mercadal changed as a woman, as an inhabitant of space, as a social being?
I think many things have changed; I am not the same person who had her first personal exhibition in 2012, I am not remotely in the same place. My first exhibition was in Guanabacoa as a student, and now I have my first exhibition outside Cuba, being a woman who works and tries to earn a living. At that time, I was more naive than I am now. At that time, I didn’t consider myself a feminist, something I do now. In 2012, I saw photography as a hobby, as something else, and now I visualize more rigorously this thing of being a photographer. At that time, I was in a comfort zone, in a context I knew, in which I had grown up, and emigrating implied leaving behind all that life I knew and leaving behind who I was. In other words, leaving my origins, my family, my friends. It implied leaving everything behind to begin to understand a new context, totally foreign to who I used to be. I think it has been a gradual process I am still going through. Right now, I see myself at a point where I no longer recognize myself so much in Cuba, but also not in the place where I live. I’m in that limbo. I think it’s more difficult to start a career in a place where you hardly know people. In Cuba, you knew a person or two, a professor or two, and you could participate in events, in collective exhibitions, more easily than here if you don’t have the contacts, if you are not linked to a community. And I think that now, just at this point, I can say I am beginning to relate to a community of photographers in Mexico.
Categories such as memory or the passage of time are also present in your work. Is human decadence equal to the decadence of a city? Are we collapsing just as Havana is collapsing? Or could we read it in another sense?
I would like to believe that human decadence is not equal to that of the territory but in the particular case of Cuba, it almost seems so. I like your second question because, for a long time, I established an affective distance with Havana. Since I left, I decided to see everything I had lived there as if it were another life, a life that, of course, led me to where I am now, but to which I no longer want to return. The last time I had to go, in June 2024, I felt the collapse of the city in me. Maybe before I experienced the bittersweet nostalgia of returning and doing a kind of ritual: going to my favorite places, seeing my remaining friends, but this time, even though I tried to ritualize my return, everywhere I went it felt like inhabiting the void. It was not as painful when I decided to leave as when I left this time, and not because of departing but due to the feeling of oppression, the impoverishment, the anguish I saw in the faces of the people, in the ruin that Havana has become. The city is like a machine that continues to work despite everything, it keeps its rhythm, but the wear and tear, the rust, the corroded, is noticeable.
I can’t help but see a certain influence of Ana Mendieta in some of your pieces, just as I see it in those of artists more or less contemporary with you. But my question goes in another direction: could we kill that “anamendieta” way of doing things, do you see it as counterproductive, or is there nothing wrong in letting it live in other artists?
Ana Mendieta is a very significant referent. What interests me about her work is this imbrication that she does, her reflecting the body in every territory. And, perhaps, the organic way in which she represents it using the elements of those territories and others that she decides to incorporate. She appropriates the elements of the territory, for example, in her clay figures in the landscape or in her photographs of sheets hung in niches where her red silhouette is engraved. I think Ana Mendieta generates a provocation in me. I am attracted to her need to leave a trace, that pain that needs to be captured. I identify with her idea of not belonging and, at the same time, of trying to leave a mark by belonging somewhere. Maybe Ana Mendieta has become a kind of cliché, this thing about exposing the body in the territory, not only because of her but because of many women photographers who have done the same. It is something that has been done, is done, and will continue to be done. The question is to separate yourself from that cliché. It is complex. Even so, I don’t feel anguished by the specter of Ana Mendieta. When I confront the body in space, I don’t have her reference primarily in mind.
On the other hand, I visualize you as an isolated creator/photographer/artist, who is on her own, who works alone, who exists alone. Am I wrong? Do you feel you belong to something? Even alone, are you part of something else?
No, you’re not wrong. I’ve always worked alone, I’ve never been part of a creative group, neither galleries nor certain circles of legitimization. I have incredible friends with whom I have been able to share my work, my concerns and discuss them. I would like to think that I belong to that. Right now, if I had to recognize myself in a category it would be that of an intersectional feminist photographer.
If we had to take the BIG PICTURE of Cuba today, what technique would you use? How do you imagine/think of the country today with your shadows, faces, forms, and juxtapositions?
I hadn’t thought about it, but if I had to choose a technique I would go for the daguerreotype, which was the first technique used to make photographs. It’s a technique I’ve never used, but one that I would love to experiment with eventually. I feel that it would be a photograph documenting some emblematic space of the city, perhaps already in ruins, where the light would be a subtle element within the image and the rest would play with the grays in the twilight. The interesting thing about the daguerreotype is that you have to move the photograph to see the result. The surface of the daguerreotype is a kind of mirror that you have to turn or put in a certain position to see the content in one way or another. Maybe that could be an image of Cuba.
