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Havana in 13 images with Holiday Photographer Olivier Kervern
Holiday magazine photographer Olivier Kervern went
looking for everyday Havana, the city beyond the clichéd images of famous monuments, people dancing in the street, colorful old American cars ferrying tourists around the city and old buildings painted in bright colors. His vision of the city shows the people and the places as they are, from the viewpoint of a curious outsider.
by HOLIDAY MAGAZINE & DELSEY PARIS
The French photographer Olivier Kervern paid his first visit to Havana at Christmastime in December 2021 on assignment for Holiday magazine. He arrived at night, which he found “exciting and scary at the same time because you can see, but you can’t see. It was magnificent.”
A great walker, he followed his intuition over the coming days, wandering through the city and its environs with his Rolleiflex around his neck, photographing subjects that caught his eye.
It had been only two weeks since Cuba opened up after two years of pandemic-related closure, during which there was no tourism, a major source of income for the country. The melancholy feel of the nearly tourist-free city – he was the only guest in his hotel in Centro Habana, and he saw only three tourists while he was there – is beautifully captured in these images.
Cojímar
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Kervern walked from central Havana to Cojimar, a small fishing village, an excursion that took him about five hours. “Walking is wonderful,” he says. “You see so many things you’d never see otherwise.”
Cojímar, which provided the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, became a tourist attraction after the novel’s publication in 1952.
After getting caught in a downpour, Kervern started walking quickly in the direction of the center and came to a highway which, luckily for him, was on the route of the bus back
to Centro and his hotel.