For many, the Florida Everglades’ spectacular vistas exist in black and white images from the lens of landscape photographer Clyde Butcher.
Butcher’s large-format prints hang in museums around the country, adorn Florida’s Capitol and even brighten Miami International Airport. Five decades after he moved to Florida, drawn by Ivan Tors’ mid-’60s TV series Flipper, Butcher is guided by the same belief: nature matters.
“Cities have to realize that the country is very important or we couldn’t live in the cities. Where else are they going to get their oxygen from? Where are they going to get their food from?” he said from his home near Sarasota.
Unbeknownst to many, Butcher turned his lenses on the Caribbean’s largest island a decade ago, producing images that will be on view in South Florida for the first time in Cuba: The Natural Beauty, opening Thursday at Miami’s Center for Visual Communication.
Fellow Florida coastal photographer Barry Fellman, the center’s director, didn’t know at the time that Butcher made visits to Cuba in 2002 in conjunction with the University of Miami and the United Nations.
“I was very surprised with his act of making pictures in Cuba. He hadn’t talked about it before at that point in his career,” Fellman said.
“I was very excited he was taking on this challenge. He has an incredible gift for sensing periods of space and can arrive in a spot and instinctively feel what it’s about.”
What Butcher saw in Cuba stirred his inner activist.
“Nature traverses politics. There are political problems between the two countries, but nature is not one of them,” the photographer says.
“The importance of nature is the same to us as it is to them — maybe even more important to them. They have a better relationship with nature than we do. It was exciting to see a country that is unspoiled, unlike America. We raped Florida, and Cuba is about the size of Florida and look how pristine it is compared to Florida. They haven’t messed up their country like we have.”
Granted, he says, he’s speaking about rural Cuba. He visited the Sierra del Rosario and Escambray waterfalls, the Sierra Maestra mountains and forest lands in Camaguey, Pinar del Rio and La Plata but not Havana or other major cities.
The Kansas City-born Butcher, 69, generally eschews travel, but he says the Cuban countryside felt like home. Printing his lavish black and whites of mountainsides, lush jungles, grassy swamps and sandy beaches proved more challenging than taking them.
“These were not easy negatives to print,” he said.
Getting the right shot often proved a matter of luck.
“We didn’t have the opportunity to spend time waiting for the right light. We had to work in a darkroom, sunrise to sunset.”
Fellman hopes political changes on the island spur interest in protecting the environment — here and there.
“They tell us the Castro era is coming to an end. Now is a pivotal moment to pay attention to the intensely rich resources the country offers,” Fellman said. “Now is the time to preserve and maintain.”
Butcher’s goal with Cuba: The Natural Beauty, which is also a 72-page book from the University of Florida Press, is to alter perceptions Cubans have of their own land.
“I think people are going to have a good experience seeing their country in a different world than the cars and hotels and poverty and all the things people like to photograph over there.
“Basically, something that relates to everyone is nature, and that’s the reason I did it.”
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