Surface, Cuba

Coming to Cuba for a week, spent mostly in Havana, there was not going to be time to go deep. I would just be scratching the surface, and barely, at a time of true historical significance. The week before I arrived in January 2015, America and Cuba announced plans to open embassies, trade creaked open to allow returning with a hundred dollars of rum and cigars, and a new reality stretched ahead—an end to fifty years of Cuba's isolation.

I chose to make images of the varied surfaces encountered on a trip with a photography group from the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. I took photos of walls and floors, tree trunks and fields, desks and bars, cars and windows, tiles and bricks. I found unbelievably vivid colors—blue, yellow, red, orange—and their faded version, weathered and worn by sun and wind. Greys and browns brought out subtle features. Textures shaded the colorful walls and streets in a veneer ever changing: smooth, rough, pebbled, tiled, lined.

Many images in this portfolio are composites that blend photographs of these surfaces with those of the people, architecture and places that I was so fortunate to enjoy. I value the authenticity of using textures from Cuba in images of Cuba.

Hence the three meanings of the portfolio: Images taken of the surface(s) of Cuba, as a flatter substitute for the dimensional connections that arise only over time. Also, the surfaces of Cuba as a place itself, not just being the visage of walls and streets, but as if creating from their colors and textures a city of their own: Surface, Cuba. Lastly, using "surface" as a verb, a first look at the Cuba of today as it rises up through decades of diplomatic darkness, breaks through the layers of ancient embargoes, and lets history shout: Surface, Cuba!