Flash Point: Cuba

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade ago, interest in Cuba has been steadily on the rise. Today there’s a rush of American cultural tourism to the island, encouraged by the Cuban government through programs such as the Havana Biennial of Contemporary Art, and fueled from outside by a sense of inevitable alteration: See Castro’s Cuba now, before it changes forever.

At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution” surveys multiple generations of artists who have used the camera to varying purposes. LACMA curator Tim B. Wride has assembled a timely and absorbing exhibition of some 80 photographic works by 16 artists. The show tells a provocative tale.

To admittedly oversimplify, photography in Cuba since 1959 begins as a documentary record of events, evolves into poetry and more recently explores premises associated with Conceptual art. Given the global pervasiveness of Conceptualism during the past 30 years, this trajectory follows a general path from the explicitly regional to the optimistically international.

The show opens with two photographers--Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, better known as Korda, and Osvaldo Salas--who were grown adults when the Cuban Revolution swept the Batista regime from power. Not surprisingly, their documentary pictures often serve a frankly propagandistic function.

Korda’s photograph of Che Guevara is among the most famous images of the 20th century (its enormous impact on subsequent artists and on Latin American popular culture was the subject of a fascinating exhibition at UCLA’s Fowler Museum in 1997). Korda simultaneously endows the charismatic freedom fighter with the humility of an Everyman and the exalted presence of an Olympian hero.

A second Korda photograph creates a powerful picture of the revolutionary ideal. A lone man, dressed in work clothes and perched atop a tall urban lamppost, is portrayed as both a distinctive individual and virtually indistinguishable from the mass of countrymen who spread out in a sea of humanity, filling a city square behind him.

The show’s next section--its largest--focuses on eight photographers born after the start of World War II but mostly before Cuba’s revolution. As children or teenagers they lived through the nation’s military turmoil and sudden social and political transformation. As artists they developed in various ways.

Some, such as Jose A. Figueroa, used photojournalism to tell everyday narratives with large implications. A 1972 sequence of three photographs shows a man on horseback riding down a dirt road away from the camera, as another man on a tractor approaches from the distance, finally arriving in the foreground. As the two riders pass each other on the graded road, the waning of an old way of life and the arrival of a new one is succinctly asserted.

Others, including Enrique de la Uz and Ivan Canas, memorialize workers in ways that suggest the precarious mix of objectivity and subjectivity that characterizes the most persuasive Socialist Realism. Among the show’s most haunting pictures are Canas’ “The Centenarians” (1969), iconic photographs of old men whose past is etched into their careworn faces, but whose abbreviated future may or may not bring the realization of unspoken dreams.

In terms of straightforward street photography, especially focusing on musicians and social dancing, the work of Maria Eugenia Haya (called Marucha) is hard to beat. Her richly textured prints from the 1970s forsake highfalutin heroism for public expressions of joy.

The capacity for photographic images and processes to function as romantic talismans or imaginative fictions is also encountered in this section. Magical Realism coexists with the Socialist kind.

Jose Manuel Fors’ “The Great Flower” (1999) is a 6-foot circle whose thousands of metaphoric petals are composed from tiny snapshots--feathers, shells, nudes, paintings, landscapes, portraits, still lifes, etc. Printed in sepia tones, the inventory of images both natural and cultural collectively form the seed-producing structure of this modern organism.

Rogelio Lopez Marin (known as Gory, and now an expatriate and a painter who lives in Miami) and Marta Maria Perez Bravo mingle image and text. In work from the mid-1980s, Perez Bravo couples intimate if anonymous pictures--a hugely pregnant woman, another in a slip--with cryptic notations that suggest inexplicable yet fateful mysteries. Gory’s work from the same period uses layered negatives to fabricate magical stories--an abandoned swimming pool filled by a breaking ocean wave, or featuring an automobile standing Christ-like on the surface of the water. The photographs are coupled with poetry.

(Incidentally, what’s up with all the one-word nicknames among Cuban photographers? Korda, Marucha, Gory--it’s one tradition that the otherwise helpful exhibition catalog does not explain.)

Gory’s 1986 photo-text piece is also the show’s first work in color, and it turns out to be one of the few. The overall emphasis on black-and-white pictures throughout the last 40 years of “Shifting Tides” offers silent testimony to material privations, with which these artists must cope.

The six youngest photographers, all in their 30s, approach their work from directions that can loosely be described as Conceptualist. Most produce work that is disappointingly thin, but two stand out.

Abigail Gonzalez starts with Cuba’s notably heroic photojournalist tradition, but his tale of ordinary life that illuminates larger human truths turns out to be more ironic than iconic. Like outtakes from a carefully staged home movie, the series “Naked Eyes” (1995) shows domestic scenes that hover between intimate and intrusive. Heads are starkly cropped, angles of vision are vertiginous, people are caught seemingly unawares in the bedroom or toilet. Grainy printing sets your teeth on edge. These sweet-and-sour pictures concoct a disarming genre that could be called Tabloid Socialist Realism.

Carlos Garaicoa photographs decayed urban sites, and these pictures become launching pads for fantastical large-scale drawings. The photographs readily accept the most mundane feature of documentary recording--point and shoot. The drawings, shown alongside, do not.

Instead, the drawings restore crumbling buildings to their former glory--or even more--while total ruins become cues for hallucinatory inventions. Shattered concrete pilings in one photograph morph into a carefully rendered field of gigantic mushrooms, spreading out before an elegant palace, or a tumbledown structure is transformed into a refined triumphal arch.

In these works the shared social space of public life becomes private space artistically shared. For Garaicoa, imagination always trumps the limitations of realism--a commitment with ramifications far beyond the Cuban island.

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“Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A., (323) 857-6000, through July 1.