About

Sven Creutzmann

For the ones in a hurry:

I was born in East Germany, later educated as commercial photographer in Hamburg. I worked in studios for 3 years, followed by 7 years covering news for Reuters. For the past 25 years I have been working for magazines, mainly reporting about Cuba and other Latin American countries, like Brazil. I have published 4 books, (the latest just now about Havana), and I give photo workshops in Latin America.

For the more patient ones:

I was born in 1962 behind the Iron Curtain in East Berlin. In ‘71, during the Cold War, my parents and I moved to West Germany (well, actually we were bought free, since my parents did not really get along with the East German system – to say the least- and East Germany back then had a program “selling” dissidents).

In Hamburg I was educated in commercial photography in one of the city’s biggest photo studios, Kleinhempel. The advertising micro cosmos is really fascinating and one can learn a lot, but after 3 years I left the studio world in search for real life images.

For seven years I worked for the British news agency Reuters, covering major national and international events, like the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 (which was quite an experience seeing the country that I was born in disappear from the world map) and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics.

Working for a major news agency such as Reuters teaches you to be fast and to capture the essence of a story in one image. I remember calling our headquarter in London telling them for example that I had 5 images ready to transmit and the London desk would reply: “One best!”, which means I had to narrow down the entire story to one (!) photo.

Covering news was a fantastic learning experience, however, the downside is, that you are rushing to get the pictures out on the “wire”, when you actually want to stay longer, dig a little deeper. So I left news and for the past 26 years I have been working on stories mainly for mayor magazines like Geo, Stern or newspapers like the New York Times, allowing me to spend weeks, and even months on a story, either on assignment or self-assigned.

In the late 1980s, together with a photographer friend of mine, I spent half a year travelling through the Caribbean, working on our own projects, because back then, nobody knew us out there in the magazine world, so we had to produce stories on our own. That trip was a life changer. One of the countries we visited was Cuba, by far the most interesting and challenging place of all the others I had visited before. I went back soon after my first visit, producing a big story about vintage US cars, on two occasions the authorities even closed, for two hours, Havana’s famous Malecon waterfront boulevard. That story was a huge success in Germany and Europe and finally turned out to be the spark for my path down the reportage road.

In Cuba I met a journalist from German reporter agency Zeitenspiegel with which I signed up and we did many, many very nice stories together, in Cuba, and all over Latin America. For more than three decades now I have been documenting the Revolution of Fidel Castro’s Cuba; since 1993 as West Germany’s first Permanent Correspondent. Being the only German photographer ever to be permanently accredited in Cuba, I’ve been lucky enough to have had privileged access over the years.

As a result, so far I have published 4 books about Cuba, the latest one by Germany’s prestigious publishers house Frederking & Thaler.

Cuba is at the centre of my professional work, but I have produced many stories in other Latin American countries, from portraying Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, shooting the Lapislazuli mine in the Andes in Chile or a story about Rocinha, Brazil’s biggest favela

Since photography keeps being such an amazing thing to me, I have wanted to pass on that sensation (along with some knowledge gathered in the past almost 4 decades) to others, so I am also giving workshops, all over Latin America. Together with my fellow photographer colleague and friend Otto von Münchow, we founded a workshop organisation, Blue Hour Photo Workshops. Ever since, teaching has been one the most thrilling experiences for me.

“Summa Cum Laude”

Ruth Eichhorn, GEO magazine, Director of Photography

(about the "Brazil Superpower" story)

"I feel like Schindler"

Hugo Izarra, publisher, Standdart Magazine

(as editing photos for a portfolio story about my work)