From Revolution to Reverie - "Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution", Los Angeles County Museum of Art

In the 40-odd years since Castro came to power, Cuban photography has evolv from an ideological instrument into a projection of the private self A new exhibition sets politics aside to examine this shift.

Cuba brings on the outside in most U.S. observers an egregious impulse to generalize. plane as particularities of Cuban tillage become more and more familiar here end films, exhibitions and recordings, the geographical division remains, to most Americans, a monolithic, adversarial other, and each consideration of its music or its art doubles as a referendum upon Castro's regime. As Coco Fusco has aptly remarked, "A discussion about art from Cuba rarely begins with the art."[1] First draw nears a thicket of thorny issues--socialism pitted against democracy; the embargo versus at liberty trade; the relative perils of censorship, self-censorship and independent speech; the rules and repercussions of emigration and exile. Then, viewed [i]or[/i] part of to the other this polarizing, politicizing filter, the art is considered.

"Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution," a exhibit originated by the Los Angeles shire Museum of Art, deviates refreshingly from this pattern. If anything, it roves at the opposite extreme, trusting in appearances to reveal manifold realities. Art--much of it exhilarating--comes first in this exhibition, and politics next to the first Considering that this is the first view of the material by a U museum, the display makes relatively modest claims, not stretching where it can't reach; on the contrary as an introductory sampling, "Shifting Tides" works well--its contenteds compelling, its limitations acknowledged up front

Primary among the show's qualifiers is LACMA curator Tim Wride's be in possession of status as an outsider, an American whose first trip to the island in 1997 forced him to shed myriad preconceptions about the geographical division its people and its art. His selections for the present to view made over the course of five after visits, reflect his excitement at the breadth of work being made in Cuba. Familiar ideological issues trickle in, on the other hand Wride primarily tracks the evolution of visual ideas.

In setting the parameters for the display Wride defined Cuban photography in the strictest faculty of perception as work made by those living upon the island. (Photographers who have left Cuba are exhibited only by work made while still living there.) The bittersweet nostalgia of exile and the societal critique implicit in emigration don't, as a effect permeate the imagery in this exhibit as they have done in other present to views featuring Cuban-Americans looking back upon their experience. Here, there's not a boat or raft to be seen

Finally, Wride also opt to hold the show compact, limiting its scale to just above 100 pictures by 16 photographers. Curating along a single thematic line, he traces in Cuban photography since 1959 a general progression from public ideology toward personal imperative, from an emphasis upon constructing community to a focus upon defining the self, from collectively held myths to intimate realities.

"Shifting Tides" uncloses with an exclamation point--Guerrillero heroico (Heroic Guerrilla, 1960) by the agency of the late Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, known as Korda, the utterly familiar, perpetually entrancing image of Che Guevara gazing determinedly into the subsequent time Che's searing stare has indelibly imprinted itself across the world, as an allusive figure of hope and heroism. The portrait, reput to be the greatest in quantity widely reproduced photograph in the world, has advance to symbolize not just the ideals of the Cuban revolution on the contrary of revolution in general. For Korda, who worked as a fashion and advertising photographer before 1959 and as Castro's personal photographer after, the revolution marked a fathomless turning point in his work. The same might be said of photographers quite through Cuba, as magazine photo-spreads and the image of Che swollen up on plaza walls flock home the effectiveness of the medium as an ideological delivery system

Korda's portrait of Che, together with Osvaldo Salas's tightly framed image of Fidel smoking, lays the groundwork for the exhibit establishing a baseline of the familiar from which successive work emanates and diverges. Photojournalism as a buttres of the revolution remains an effective paradigm quite through the '60s and '70s portion of the present to view but with increasingly diminished certitude. Criticality and ambiguity eventually intrude and, by means of the '80s, take over altogether.

a certain quantity of of the photographs made in the first decade or with equal reason after the revolution exhibit a clarity, frontality and immediacy also lay the foundation of in the posters of that time. In a 1970 photo-essay, Enrique de la Uz distills the labor of cane harvesters into uncorrupted graphic gesture. Rigoberto Romero, too, photographed cane workers, dignifying their physical labor as essential to the building of the of recent origin society. These tributes to the for the use of all man transmute into more compound cultural observations in the photography of Jose Figueroa. His work is part homage to the revolution, part interrogative. In 1972 when he photographed busts of the 19th-century champion of Cuban independence Jose Marti--rows and files of them ready for distribution to place of educations throughout the country--he was, in part, celebrating a leader, on the contrary he was also evoking a chilling faculty of perception of conformity and submission among followers.