Visual Studies Commons^™

Identidades Por Negociar: La Presentación De La Piel Humana En La Fotografía De René Peña., Ilka Kressner

Languages, Literatures and Cultures Faculty Scholarship

This paper analyzes several works by Cuban photographer René Peña from the point of view of his depiction of the human skin. Peña, one of Cuba’s most renowned photographers, with an impressive list of exhibits in Cuba, the US, and Europe, became known as an artist of sharp and formalistic black and white photographs, mostly focusing on the human body. Through his idiosyncratic staging and estranging juxtapositions on the photographic paper, Peña’s work is never solely artistic: it challenges for instance the binary opposition between black and white, the concept of fixed sexualities, or the process of aging.

In many …