El Muro is a collection of ten offset triptych photographs and two bilingual essays by the artist and the Cuban ethnographer Abel Sierra. Eduardo Hernández Santos made these photographs of homosexuals, transgenders, and crossdressers in the summer of 2005 at Havana, Cuba¿s seafront wall. Taken together, the pictures in this book tell a remarkable story of human endurance and triumph. Hernández Santos presents his subjects not as passive players but as people who struggle (though more quietly than not) against discrimination even though such struggle is very risky. Working only at night, Hernández Santos developed his film with expired chemistry; he printed his images on outdated photo paper, then developed them with exhausted chemistry. His darkroom was his darkroom. He did this not out of choice but out of necessity. Once Hernández Santos made his prints, he used transfer lettering to literally press onto his images the words of the late, gay, Cuban poet and playwright, Virgilio Pinera. Late one night at 4:00am, on his way home from El Muro (The Wall), Hernández Santos was beaten and robbed of his camera. His project ended then and there. Born in 1966, Eduardo Hernández Santos graduated in printmaking from Academia Nacional de Artes He has made numerous series of photographic and mixed media collages, most notably Strong 2005 and Corpus-Frágile 2002 that address issues of gay identity. His work has been exhibited in the United States, Germany, Japan, Canada, Portugal, Spain and Cuba. He lives, works and teaches in Havana, Cuba.
