Rolling blackouts, food shortages and uncollected garbage piling up in the streets: that is the Havana photographer Kelly Conlin kept going back to over multiple visits between late 2025 and early 2026. “More than one person told me it was the worst they have experienced in their lifetime,” he told PetaPixel. Yet his first photo book, Tender Weather, published in September 2026, turns its lens away from the crisis and toward what survives inside people’s homes.
The project started with a wink. While working the same few blocks of Central Havana, Conlin caught the eye of a grandfather who winked at him from inside his house. Conlin took it as an invitation, and the first frame followed: the old man getting a pedicure from his granddaughter while her grandmother sewed an outfit for her.
“After that I concentrated on just a few streets and returned day after day,” Conlin says. “People began to recognize me. Someone I had photographed would introduce me to a neighbor or relative, and one encounter would lead to another.”
Patience instead of a long lens
The approach is the opposite of drive-by street photography. Conlin says he did not expect to walk in and make the picture right away. He stayed long enough for families to stop noticing the camera and go back to what they had been doing, and those were the moments he wanted. In Central Havana that suited the setting. Doorways, stoops and open windows make daily life unusually visible from the street, and the line between public and private space is much blurrier than he was used to in the United States.
Once invited in, though, there was nowhere to hide. “Everything happened at very close range, and even a small movement on my part could change the picture completely,” he explains. Working that close drew his attention to hands: preparing food, praying, grooming one another, resting on a shoulder. Only later did he realize how much those gestures had come to define the series.
The book itself
According to Conlin’s website, Tender Weather is a signed first edition. Its specs:
- Size: 22.5 x 30 cm (9″ x 12″)
- 56 pages, sewn binding
- Munken Pure 150g paper
- Printed offset in Italy by Grafiche Antiga
- Curation, editing and design by Alejandra Martinez Moreno
- Price: $45, with worldwide shipping
The site also lists Tender Weather as an IPA Jury Top 5 Selection for 2026.
Half goes back to Havana
The book comes out at a hard time for the island. Cuba has been under U.S. sanctions since 1960, and PetaPixel reports that things got worse after the U.S. seized Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, which cut off much of Cuba’s fuel supply. Conlin is sending 50% of the proceeds toward medicine and other essential supplies that are difficult to obtain in Cuba. His site says he will carry those supplies to Havana himself on future visits and hand them directly to the families who let him in.
“I don’t want to exaggerate what that can accomplish,” he says. “But these families welcomed me into their homes and allowed me to photograph very personal moments in their lives. It seemed important that something from the book make its way back to them.”
