Cherchez la femme (Search for the Woman)

Cherchez la femme (Search for the Woman) is a photographic essay on women in Cuba. Luc Chessex made the black-and-white pictures while living there in the 1960s.

The Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne published this 96-page hardcover, in French and English, with a text by Daniel Girardin. The pictures come from Chessex’s work now in the museum’s collection. Booksellers date the book to 2014, the year of the museum’s exhibition CCCC (Castro, Coca, Che, Cherchez la femme). That show ran from 4 June to 24 August 2014 and presented four series of photographs from his years in Cuba.

Chessex was born in Lausanne in 1936 and left for Havana in 1961. He lived in Cuba until 1975, working with the Prensa Latina agency and as photo editor of the magazine Cuba internacional. He presented Cherchez la femme in Havana in 1966 under the title “photo-lying,” a work on Cuban women that goes beyond political discourse and questions the idea of photography as a mirror of the world. The other series in the 2014 show were Le Visage de la Révolution, a 1969 photo essay on images of Fidel Castro, and Che and Coca, from his 1982 retrospective Quand il n’y a plus d’Eldorado.