Ernesto Bazan

Bazan has received a 1st prize at the World Press Photo contest, the Lange-Taylor Prize, and the W. Eugene Smith Grant. He has had a solo exhibition at the Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, D.C. and his work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

The recorded working language is Italian. Places of work recorded in the authority are New York City. Work by Ernesto Bazan is recorded in the collections of Art Institute of Chicago and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship.

Bazan was born and grew up in Palermo, Sicily. His father was a doctor. He started taking photographs as a teenager and at age 17 decided to become a photographer. Two years later, he moved to New York City to study photography and began working internationally.

He first traveled to Cuba in 1992 and lived there until 2006. He married a Cuban woman, Sissy, and became a father to twin boys, Stefano and Pietro. He and his family moved to Veracruz, Mexico "after suspicious authorities disapproved of his photography classes, which they thought were unauthorized journalism seminars". His self-published Cuba trilogy includes the "melancholy, gritty urban world" of Bazan: Cuba (2008) in black-and-white; the Cuban countryside in colour in Al Campo (2011); and Isla (2014), containing black-and-white panoramas. In 2014, they moved to Jersey City, USA. In 2016, after the death of Fidel Castro, Bazan again visited Cuba which provided the material for the book 25 de Noviembre (2020). Before You Grow Up (2017) is a family album for his sons. In it, "photographs are mixed with drawings, letters, his mother's journal entries, memorabilia and notebook pages." According to James Estrin in The New York Times, Before You Grow Up "captures the joys and sorrows of 21st-century family life" and "is about the importance of family and the fragility of life".

• Raw Poetry: Ernesto Bazan and Cuba, Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, D.C., September 2023 – January 2024