Book Description

Divided Soul represents photographer David Alan Harvey's thirty-year journey through the Spanish and Portuguese diaspora in the Americas. In this selection of over a hundred colour photographs, Harvey explores the exuberance and incongruities of a life and culture that hold for him an endless fascination. The photographs are presented within thematic chapters, each of which is introduced by Harvey's own commentary. The passionate and divided soul of the Hispanic world, where tradition and ritual are inherent to everyday life, is revealed in Harvey's evocative, and often contradictory, images: a pulsating carnival in Cuba's Trinidad, a fervent African tribal ceremony in Brazil, an erotic disco in Lisbon, a Whitsuntide procession in Andalucia and a first Communion in Mexico. Adopting an approach that combines intuition, patience and persistent curiosity - together with a rejection of cumbersome equipment - Harvey succeeds in minimizing the distance between himself and his subjects, producing images that capture the natural choreography of people within places and that resonate with magic.