Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, 1950 – Miami, Florida, 2019
Tito Trelles began photographing in Cuba, documenting friends, neighbors and daily life in Luyanó, a working-class neighborhood of Havana. In 1992 he left Cuba and reached the United States through Mexico; many of his early negatives, left at a friend's home in Mexico, were later destroyed in a flood.
In New York he moved from documentary work toward staged and conceptual photography, and later to an extended body of nude and portrait work made in collaboration with his models, including the series The Magical Life of Berenice Fulmer, photographed in Coney Island. In 2013 he self-published La Habana Landscape, Cuba by a Cuban, in which he asks readers to "try to see each photo as an individual story." He died in Miami in 2019.
Tito Trelles
Photo credit: Frank Guiller
La Habana Landscape, Cuba by a Cuban
In the introduction to his essay "La Habana Landscape, Cuba by a Cuban" (self-published, Blurb, 2013) Tito asks: "Please try to see each photo as an individual story... It is all I ask..."
"This is who we are ... no sugar added”
Canción para despertar a papá, 1984
David y Miguelito... Luyanó, 1983
Paquita mirando la lluvia, La Habana, 1983
La caja de herramientas de mi madre, 1983
Odín castigado, Luyanó, 1982
The Magical Life of Berenice Fulmer
From his need to get away from crowded everyday scenes, Tito takes refuge in personal stories with his female models where, beyond the banal and objectualized representation of the woman's body, dialogues are revealed through visual metaphors that without the use of words penetrate the inner world of his models. In his photographic series "The Magical Life of Berenice Fulmer", made in Coney Island, New York city, Tito artistically recreates a reality, a story, tricking the eye of the viewer into seeing what lay beneath the story.
Berenice, the kite enchanter
Berenice at the beach
The Prayer
The Ascension
Last cry for a lost kite
Goodbye Berenice