Today we’re featuring Kevin Slack, a photographer based out of Toronto, Ontario (my adopted home!). We posted one of Kevin’s pictures courtesy of BeautifulMag a few weeks ago, and we thought we’d see if he’d like to contribute a profile to our site.

Kevin’s passion is photographing Cuba, which he discovered in 2001, and particularly taking pictures Cuban men. Amazingly, none of his models are professionals, although you’d hardly know it to see his pictures There’s a wealth of eye candy to check out on his site (www.snappedshots.com). He also has a membership program, which accesses another 1,200 or so photos, including downloadable high-resolution images and downloadable photo sets of the passionate, intense men who catch Kevin’s eye and lens in Cuba.

Kevin was one of the first photographers we contacted when we started our hunt for legal images to post, and we’re thrilled that he’s allowed us to show off some of his work. He’s also agreed to answer some questions for us, and the passion he feels for Cuba is unmistakable in his answers.

Why Cuba?

Cuba is an open theater, a beautiful disaster. I get off the plane and the smell of it comes at me like an old lover. It wakes up my body and my soul and my mind. And I am always inspired.  Make no mistake, Cuba is clearly flawed but I love it better for its flaws.  Cuba seduces me. It is stripped down and laid bare and hewn roughly from history. Is it Cuba’s very public living theater? Is it the sea salt in the air or the diesel congestion? Is it the tropical sun? Is it the music? Is it the wandering whispering spirits of history through the crumbling labyrinth? Ah, the best seduction doesn’t need to explain itself. It only needs to work. And it works. I am seduced. And I am urgent too. For me, Cuba feels like the end of a lucid dream. You are aware that you are dreaming but you feel waking coming. Cuba needs to change. But I fear that the Cuba I love, the Cuba I want to love, will not survive change. And so I travel and I work urgently. Seduction and urgency collide and push together and push forward.

Why Cuban Men?

Cuban men have a fierce sexuality and a brazen, raw, unapologetic masculinity and an openness too.  Like everything else, sex and sexuality is on display.  My models serve as the nearly heraldic characters of this seduction. They are self-possessed without being self-aware.  They are confident and proud too, without being particularly entitled.  Their vibrant and their unapologetic sexuality, yes, their tranquil immodesty, seduces me, incites me completely and it’s this seduction, this wonderful anxiety, this brilliant mystery that puts me, when I’m in their company, almost in a religious state of frenzy and worship. It’s not just their confidence which blazes, it’s also their trust and their vulnerability too, which combine to enthrall.

What’s more, I find sexuality in Cuba endlessly fascinating and always surprising.  Sexuality, as far as I can tell, is so divinely fluid and almost incidental.  It’s my experience that my Cuban friends don’t want or need the labels or the categories.  And I find that altogether enviable.  We are too quick, I think, to want to name our desires. How liberating it must be to be free of the labels.  And just to live, and just to fuck.  Without the labels, without the names, nothing in particular is perverse.

The Process

Listen. I love the process of my work perhaps even more than I love the product.  I am so grateful and so privileged that I have got to do, that I continue to do, what I love.  There’s always this frenzy of urgency. Time is always too short. There’s also a sort of agitation of spirit working where I’m borrowing the space and the history too.  But the mad experiences I have had and the enduring friendships I have made shine brighter for it.

You said in a past interview that you don’t use professional models? How do you pick a model? Are you looking for anything in particular?

In Cuba, the kind of man I love to photograph is everywhere. Just walk down the street. Young, muscular, sun-burnished, and fierce.  Most of my favorite models I have found walking down the street. I stop them, and introduce myself in clumsy Spanish and tell them I am a photographer while showing them samples of my work.  And I ask them if they are interested. And so far, after ten years, nobody has been obviously offended or angry. I found Jorge Luis this way. I loved his look so much that I stopped him in the street with his mother and his brother at his side.

Now that I think of it, I found all six of the twins in the street. But I have also had the luxury of time too after ten years.  Now friends will introduce friends. Friends and models who know the work I do will bring a friend or three to my private house in Havana for impromptu auditions and interviews. Sure, I respond to masculinity and sexuality and eroticism. But after that, the thing that I look for most in a model is enthusiasm and trust. A model needs to trust me. And I need to know that they are interested in doing it, not just for the money and not just to have a beautiful image of themselves, but for the experience of doing it.

Some models are better than others, of course. But I’m not often wrong with my instincts regarding who will make a good model. And models are usually well prepared for what I’m looking for. Once in a while, I will find a potential model who, physically, is exactly what I’m looking for. Or who has something special that intrigues me. And I will spend the extra effort building that relationship and trust; and when it works, it is very satisfying. But, really that vivid and fluid sexuality, and that vulnerability that I love in so many of my models, is raw material. It’s all there already; I don’t have to manufacture it. I just have to mold it.

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Kevin has also published a calendar for 2013 which is available at Amazon. It’s September now, there are only 105 shopping days left until Christmas (yes, we’re counting), so it’s never too early to check it out and keep it in mind for girlfriends, boyfriends, your favourite wrangler, or yourself.

Thank you so much to Kevin for letting us pick at his brain a little and showing off his amazing images. Links for all the sites discussed today are below.

Kevin Slack – Snapped Shots

Snapped Shots Membership

2013 Cuban Men calendar at Amazon

Kevin on Facebook