Eduardo del Valle: Childhood Memories from the Other Side of the Water

​Photographs by Eduardo del Valle

For 40 years, Eduardo del Valle and his wife Mirta Gómez, have worked in collaboration focusing their practice and photographic series on subjects in states of transformation. Their work has received the international attention throughout the years with accolades including two Guggenheim Fellowships, solo exhibitions at New York Museum of Modern Art, NY, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, and seven books of their photographs published by Nazraeli Press.

Independently over the past nine years, Eduardo del Valle has worked on a visual autobiography of his experiences and observations central to his childhood, his recollections of Cuba between 1951 to 1961, when he left the country of his birth at the age of ten, never to return.  The photographic series Childhood Memories from the Other Side of the Water portrays certain aspects of the artists’ memories that have stayed with him, wedged deep at the far end of his recollection, aspects that have challenged del Valle forever in an unfading fashion. The project culminated into 88 autobiographical photographs, recreating memories shot entirely outside of the island.

Organized by the MDC Museum of Art + Design, Childhood Memories from the Other Side of the Water is accompanied by a fully illustrated 126-page catalogue, with an introduction by Tony Mendoza, preface by Juan A. Martinez, poems by Ellen Bass and Richard Blanco, and afterword by Daniel Gottlieb. The catalogue will be released in September, 2015 and published by Nazraeli.