The idea of Cuba

Description

"This journey into contemporary Cuba by photographer and writer Alex Harris is both an evocation of life on the island and an original meditation on the nature of documentary photography that reveals what Harris has learned over thirty-five years as a documentary photographer." "Like his mentor, Walker Evans, who photographed Cuba at 1933 at a pivotal moment, Harris arrived in Cuba with his camera at a crossroads in Cuban history. Well known for other thirty-five years of photographic work in the Hispanic Southwest, Alaska, and the American South, Harris made three trips to Cuba to photograph a nation coming to grips with the economic and social devastation that followed the collapse of the socialist bloc in 1989, a nation beginning to imagine a future without Fidel Castro." "On each trip to Cuba, Harris used a different approach to peer deeper into the fabric of Cuban society. In the foreground of Harris's photographs and text are some of the archetypes of contemporary Cuban life: the indomitable 1950s American car, the beautiful young woman, and the revered revolutionary hero. Yet Harris recasts these symbols. We don't look at the car, but through it to consider the tangled relationship between Cuba and the United States."--Jacket.

Subjects