CubaPLUS Magazine

This artist of the lens found her vocation in her native province of Matanzas. Her first snapshot dates back to November 11, 2006, at her great-grandmother Paulita’s house, a place she used to go as a child when her grandparents took her there on Sundays to get together and enjoy family time.

As she told CubaPLUS Magazine, It is that image of my great-grandmother that I had seen for years since I was a child, where the serenity of our common ancestors was her main attire. This portrait became an important piece of my series and significant shows within the country and outside it. It is also the image that leads an essay I started in the summer of 2020, six years after our mother Paulita passed away, and I decided to return to her house, where I found a cousin who lives there with her two children, and from there came my photo essay El mundo de Karoline.”

This work allows me to treasure all the emotions that I relived in my mind through Karoline. It is an interchange of blood relatives that opens a door to continue every summer to discover this story that speaks about my past, my present and my future. A world that orbits around each and every one of the women in my family who have lived in the house on this small family estate where it all began.”

For her, photography is an intuitive and expressive act, the sensation of opening her mind to see clearly everything that interests her. “People may think that in my photography I am talking about stray dogs, children or the elderly, but in reality I go beyond that, I show what interests me”.

ldquo;I consider myself a humanist photographer, someone who goes out into the street without the pretension of finding the super photo, rather I let my intuition guide me, to stop when I feel that I am in a unique moment, unique for the light, for the object or subject to photograph and for a whole host of illusions, for a better world.”

Loneliness is a recurring theme and has been the common thread in many of her series, such as “Other memories of underdevelopment”, a personal exhibition at the Fototeca of Cuba.

On this theme, Daylene tells us that in her work she tries to reflect on the fate of today’s man facing loneliness and lack of communication. To this end, she does not construct specific environments, the story is watered down, and she is only interested in presenting a scene frozen in the very circumstance that surrounds it.

Through her multiple photographic investigations, she has sought to show the inexcusable march of time through everything. People, animals, buildings, streets, cities connected to each other through her perspective, always to capture that critical interval where physical and emotional substance is condensed.

The confinement imposed by the pandemic allowed her to direct her gaze towards the interior of her home. “It is very interesting how, from the confinement we all endured, my perspective began to turn towards what I have inside the house, towards a more personal gaze; this is how the series Isabella and Jennifer in confinement emerged in the last two years; for the first time my two teenage daughters became the protagonists of my narrative to talk about their postponed dreams. Precisely this Friday, March 3, the exhibition "Isabella in Confinement”, in The Black Wall of the Cuban Art Factory, which can be visited until April 3.