Fortunate Steps gathers John Comino-James’s photographs of a single Havana street, the Calzada del Diez de Octubre. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2010 as a 168-page hardback, it follows his earlier Havana book, A Few Streets, A Few People, and shares that project’s refusal of the postcard view. The street runs through a working district rather than the routes tourists take, and the book stays with it: portraits made at close range, candid observation, and attention to façades that record more than a century of changing architectural fashion. The road’s own history gives the sequence its depth. It long predates the seventeenth-century parish of Jesús del Monte and was renamed in 1918 for the uprising of 10 October 1868, when Carlos Manuel de Céspedes declared war against Spanish colonial rule. Later highways displaced its role as the principal route south, yet it remains a busy thoroughfare, and the photographs treat that persistence as a subject in itself.
Comino-James works from within the street’s daily life rather than observing it from a distance, a method established in his first Havana book and sustained here. The pictures move between people and architecture without forcing either into illustration of the other; the duotone printing gives the sequence a tonal continuity that suits its long view of the street’s fabric. The subject is not novelty or spectacle but a place that holds a specific position in the memory of Habaneros.
For collectors of documentary and street photography, the book is a considered example of the sustained single-location project, and of the kind of urban portrait that British independent photography publishing has supported well. Its interest lies in the coherence of that commitment: one photographer, one road, a historical frame that the pictures neither overstate nor ignore. Readers who know Comino-James’s other books will recognise the same patience here; those coming to him for the first time will find a body of work in which place, history, and everyday life are held together without strain.
