A Revolutionary Project: Explorations of Cuba from Walker Evans to Now

“A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now” is a photographic exhibition that looks at three critical periods in Cuba’s history as witnessed by photographers before, during and after the country’s 1959 Revolution. The exhibition juxtaposes Walker Evans’s 1933 images from the end of the Machado dictatorship, with views by contemporary foreign photographers Virginia Beahan, Alex Harris and Alexey Titarenko, who have explored Cuba since the withdrawal of Soviet support in the 1990s. Walker Evans's distinctive photographic style was nurtured by New York in the late 1920s, but it became more fully formed by his 1933 experiences in Cuba.

Virginia Beahan, Alex Harris and Alexey Titarenko look at Cuba in very different ways. In 2001, Virginia Beahan began a multiyear project on Cuba; Beahan’s Cuba is a land of contradictions, full of disappointments and hope, decay and rejuvenating beauty, simultaneously anchored to the past while looking beyond the present.

Through distinct vantage points, Alex Harris probed the country’s propensity for ingenuity as it underwent great transition. His 1998-2003 photographs focus on three icons of the island, the American car, the beautiful woman and the revolutionary hero, as metaphors to explore the distortions with which Cubans and Americans see one another.

Alexey Titarenko’s 2003 photographs of life in Cuba depict people persevering amid varying states of ruin: collecting food rations, fixing long-outmoded cars or playing baseball. Titarenko was drawn to Cuba following years spent photographing his home town of Saint Petersburg, a once-grand city transformed by revolution and slow decay under Communist rule. Titarenko deliberately photographed Havana in much the same way he’d photographed his native St. Petersburg, as a city that has suffered very much from communist policies and communist rule. And so his black-and-white and very dusty gray imagery removes any spark, any color from Havana, which is in fact very colorful.

This piece includes a number of black-and-white and color photographs, a photo-gallery and three documentary short films.

http://disembedded.wordpress.com/2011/10/02/a-revolutionary-project-explorations...