From Cuba with love

Plymouth bookstore owner hopes his volume of photos will keep shop open

May 7, 2006

Jack Kenny looks deep into the faces of Cuba's ordinary people on his visits there. Carlos Valdez, left, was photographed in 2003; the man with the Che Guevara tattoo, right, in 2000.
Jack Kenny has a sinking feeling when he looks around his little gray-sided photo store.

The shop is squeezed behind a dry cleaner and a fried-chicken joint on Plymouth's south side.

He can count boxes of unsold camera film approaching their expiration dates. Few people are buying film these days, and Kenny wonders how long Quicksilver Photo, originally a film-based business, can survive in the digital age.

"I'm dying," Kenny says.

Hey, not so fast.

True, the little shop at 1150 W. Ann Arbor Road once had 10 fulltime employees on its payroll and now has only two part-timers. It's true, too, that Kenny has warned workers and customers more than once that the store was ready to close. But still, he's hanging in.

His hope for the future comes from an odd, forbidden, place: Cuba.

Look at the inside of this shop. For conservative, largely Republican Plymouth, it's strange to see, hanging near racks of aging Fuji and Kodak film, a large framed Roberto Salas photo of Fidel Castro hobnobbing with Ernest Hemingway.

You don't see the photos of brides and high school graduates you'd expect to find in a suburban photo store. Instead, Kenny has photos of ordinary Cubans on his walls.

On the counter sits a 12-by-12-inch black-and-white book titled simply "Cuba," a collection of Kenny's photos from the island. Price: $65.

Kenny, 61, has made 40-plus illicit trips to Cuba over the past decade (it's illegal for all but a few U.S. citizens to travel there).

He published the book on borrowed money -- $39,000 total cost, with $22,000 of his friends' cash -- last fall in hopes of burnishing Cuba's reputation with Americans and, maybe, just maybe, adding some heft to his bank account.

To date, he's sold between 300 and 400 copies of the book, mostly from his Web site, http://www.corazonpress.com.

He also sells the book at three Ann Arbor bookstores -- Borders, Nicola's Books and Shaman Drum -- and through Plymouth's Book Cellar and Cafi. And they're for sale at Quicksilver.

So who is this guy who runs a conventional-looking photo store yet sneaks back and forth to Cuba four times a year?

Jack Kenny was born in Detroit and graduated from Dearborn High School in 1962. He studied at the University of Michigan until he was drafted in 1966. By 1967, he was with the Army in Vietnam.

After Vietnam, he tried carpentry and horse-training. He dabbled in photography before selling his horse farm and setting up Quicksilver Photo in 1983. He lives in Ann Arbor, but picked Plymouth at a time when there was no other fast-photo shop in town.

For years, he ran the shop and occasionally had shows of his photography.

Then in April 1996, Kenny went to Cuba expecting "a gray place, rundown, depressed economically and emotionally, not very vital."

"It turned out to be the opposite," he said. "There's not much money down there, but people are very interesting and generous."

Kenny had no trouble wandering around Havana -- and eventually other towns -- camera in hand, taking pictures of people going about their business.

A couple standing in the yard of a thatch-roofed house. A man sitting on a park bench. A farmer in a straw hat smoking a fat cigar.

"I had complete freedom to work on anything other than military facilities," he said. "The book is a representation of my view of life in Cuba today for the average Cuban."

When the 1956 Chevy Kenny was driving broke down in Cuba, a mechanic repaired a part for $5. Kenny photographed the man machining the part.

He wanted to show Americans what Cuba is really like.

"I was going to single-handedly break the embargo because people don't know what the country is like," he said.

But there are financial reasons for doing the book, too.

Do the math, Kenny says. If he sells 2,000 books at $65 each, that's a cool 130 grand. Then there's the 100 limited edition, leather-bound copies that go for $100 -- that's another $10,000.

"If I sold them all myself at retail, it's $140,000," Kenny said.

Bookstores cut into the gross, but still, he says, if he can break into the Borders international chain or find some other way of mass-marketing the book, it might just bail out the photo store.

He would be saved by Cuba.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/artic...9/-1/BUSINESS07