Herman Puig

Biography

In the autumn of 1950 a young Cuban arrived in Paris and secured a short meeting with Henri Langlois, director of the Cinémathèque Française. Langlois’s condition was simple: he would send French films to the Cinema Club of Havana if it became an official institution, because the Cinémathèque exchanged films only with similar organisations.

The Cuban was Germán Puig Paredes, known as Herman Puig. He was born on 25 February 1928 in Sagua la Grande and studied painting and sculpture. At about the age of twenty he went to Paris to study audiovisual techniques. Where and when his first short film, “Sarna”, was made is hard to say with certainty: by some accounts in Cuba before he left for Paris, by others in 1952, together with the writer Edmundo Desnoes, after his return from Paris. Puig founded the Havana film club, officially established as an institution in 1948, together with Ricardo Vigón. After the meeting with Langlois the club took the name Cinemateca de Cuba. A few months later it was closed for political reasons; it reopened only in 1961, on the initiative of Alfredo Guevara, within the newly created Cuban Institute of Cinematic Art and Industry (ICAIC). Puig later insisted that the true history of the Cinemateca had been hidden: it suited ICAIC, he said, to treat 1959 as the beginning of Cuban cinema. In October 2009 the Ateneo de Madrid formally recognised Puig and Vigón as the founders of the Cinemateca de Cuba.

He did not abandon film before ICAIC. With Carlos Franqui he made the short “Carta de una madre” (“Letter to a Mother”), and with Desnoes “Sarna” (1952); the cinematographer Ramón Suárez produced and edited “Sarna”. Néstor Almendros belonged to the same circle and shot “El Visitante” (“The Visitor”), begun around 1955 and never finished.

In the 1960s and 1970s Puig worked in Spain, photographing fashion and portraits and making advertising films. In Madrid he began experimenting with the male nude. He was arrested in an alleged drug case and charged with pornography, under Franco. By one account he failed to appear before the judge and was put on a wanted list; by another he left to avoid prison. Either way, he moved to Paris to prove that he was an artist. His work was well received there, and his photographs are now held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

In France he also became a publisher. In his own series, “Collection Nu Masculin”, he issued an album of his own work, “Yang”, and the books “Von Gloeden et le XIX siècle”, “Akademia, Le Nu académique français”, “Païdos, l’enfant nu” and “Cuir et fantasmes”. He is regarded as one of the first to publish a history of the male nude in photography.

Soon after Franco’s death Puig moved to Barcelona. At eighty he was still photographing nudes, male and female. The director David Boisseaux-Chical made a documentary about his cultural exile from Cuba, and Manuel Zayas made the film “Fermento”. In the documentary Puig said it irritated him when the wish to photograph the male body as art was reduced to pornography and homosexuality. He tried to show his work in Cuba only rarely, for fear of being taken for a sympathiser of the communist regime.

Herman Puig died in Barcelona on 25 January 2021, a month before his ninety-third birthday.