Beauty of movement: Photographer Leysis Quesada Vera immortalizes daughters' ballet journey

The photographer Leysis Quesada Vera created an oasis in a Cuban barrio.

The ephemeral beauty of movement, immortalized for eternity in a static image, leaps from the color prints of her two young daughters.

Vera’s first solo exhibition is open at Santa Fe’s Artes de Cuba Gallery. Forty-five of Vera’s prints of her children’s games and dance will hang through July 27.

Beauty of movement: Photographer Leysis Quesada Vera immortalizes daughters' ballet journey

“She’s been a photographer for about 25 years,” said gallery owner Stuart Ashman. “The majority of the images are photographed with her two daughters.”

Vera has been drawn to dance since she was a child. She loved doing exercises related to ballet, without having the slightest idea at that time of what ballet movements were. Like most young girls, she stood in front of the mirror to dance, and sometimes to act as well. But she never had the opportunity to train formally at a school or even in a workshop until she was 12 years old, by which time it was a bit too late to become a ballet dancer. She spent the early years of her childhood in a batey (a small sugar settlement in Cuba), where only about 50 families lived. There was a small school and only a few hours of electricity every day, thanks to a petroleum plant that operated sparingly. Consequently, any formal ballet training was a remote possibility from there.

Her oldest daughter, Avril, studies at the School of the National Ballet. Her youngest, Mia, contrasts her sister’s discipline by playing on the roof. The crumbling walls of the dilapidated buildings contrast with the ephemeral beauty of tutus and pirouettes.

Vera documented her children’s growth for 12 years. We see them dancing, rehearsing and playing with toys. They primp, they pose, they play.

The photographer lives in Los Sitios, a depressed Havana neighborhood.

“Los Sitios, more than a simple place, became my sanctuary of dreams,” Vera wrote. “During 12 years of inexhaustible inspiration, I realized my best moments in photography interwoven with Mia’s games and Avril’s dance. Here, my children were transformed into the muse that pushed me to see the art of photography under a different light: my light. With the birth of my little one and the beginning of Avril’s studies at the School of the National Ballet, my lens was focused on them, capturing Mia’s freedom on the roof and Avril’s discipline during her rehearsals.”

The period produced a chapter of beauty and deep reflection where the stillness of the pandemic became immortalized in her work, she added.

Her photographic life intertwines with her home and her neighborhood.

“Each image is a fragment of my personal history, a visual chronicle of the barrio where I have lived the recent years of my life, of the precious instants of my daughters,” she said. “We are a scalene triangle: the three of us united in our singularity, each one following their own path, but always converging in a common place of love and unity.”

Mia’s personality shines through her imagination as she cradles her doll amid peeling stucco and chipped paint.

Avril reveals her elegance and bearing through dance, her stretches and pliés testaments to beauty in the barrio.

“This exhibition is an homage to them, my major inspiration and motivation,” Vera said.

The exhibit also speaks to the photographer’s past as it both evokes her humble roots as it reveals the hope and beauty of the barrio.

“My work is a journey that seeks beauty in simplicity, in the most modest stages,” she said, “Relating the lives of those that, despite having little, have many dreams.”

Vera was born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1973. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1996 and has been a self-taught photographer since 2000. She is a member of UNEAC (The National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba). She incorporates her life into her work as a photographer. Vera has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, and has received major recognitions throughout her career.