Havana, Cuba, 2001 – 2002
 
The photographs were taken in Havana and Mexico City between 2001 and 2002. The book Paradiso was awarded the Leica European Publishers Award 2005 and published by six publishers in six different European countries.
Castore managed to capture the fragility and beauty of everyday life in an honest and sensitive way. And he chose to do so using color, expressively and sensually, as an active part, material, and substance of the image, far from the decorative color that serves as a backdrop to stereotyped images of postcard Cuba.
 
 
“Cuba, for Lorenzo Castore, is a pretext. Simply a moment of life, of happiness, of discovery and of pleasure. A moment in his life when he decided to push his photography to its limits. Living and photographing, in an honest way, both in relation to himself, and in relation to the people he met, with whom he interrelated and to whom he became attached. (….). He knows what motivates him – the improbable movements, the atmosphere in which he recognizes, finds and expresses himself. He likes to astound us with his surprises, he chooses to make us meet the characters who enchanted him in the Caribbean sunshine and, above all, to make us share the obvious softness of atmosphere. A languor crossed with strident moments, with permanent surprises awaiting the eye that knows how to caress them, a slow rhythm which can suddenly break loose from an unexpected blue, that can make a hole in the golden vibration – and make us doubt, day or night, the reality of the moment captured. It is for this reason that, photographically, only colour remains – colour that is the exact opposite of that used by all those who approach Cuba as a backdrop, a decor in which to make images. This is colour as a fundamental, a given of a place in which to meet ‘others’. Others without exoticism, who are our contemporaries, perhaps less fortunate than ourselves, who tell us that colour is not just the background to a seductive scene, but rather the material and the flesh of what a photograph can transcribe. It is up to you to dream the rest, for want of experiencing it.”
Christian Caujolle
 
(Excerpt from the text written by Christian Caujolle in the book Paradiso, published by Actes Sud (FR), Dewi Lewis Publishing (UK), Edition Braus (DE), Apeiron (GR), Lunwerg (ES), Peliti Associati (IT), 2005)