Stylists of the Epic and the Surreal
Holland Cotter

CUBA, shaped like a scythe, lies in the Caribbean 90 miles off Florida. For centuries it has been a kind of fantasy island to the outside world. Columbus thought it was the prettiest place he had ever seen. Later adventurers went there for gold and found it: "white gold," sugar. With African slaves to harvest the cane, they lived like grandees. By the 19th century and well into the 20th, the capital city, Havana, with its thick sea walls and rococo facades, was a cosmopolitan magnet for businessmen, artists and tourists alike. Its casinos were lavish; its night life was tireless. It was where you went to be extravagant, liberated and bad.

Even the moralizing political liberation of the 1950's and 60's had its glamour. The revolutionary troops, with their scruffy-chic beards and berets, were popular international heroes for a time. And they were led by two genuine superstars: the baby-faced Fidel Castro and the Byronic Che Guevara. When their pictures appeared in the news, readers alternately flinched and swooned. With global capitalism triumphant, yet another fantasy is on the horizon: the revival of the island as the vacation spot it once was, a semitropical dream come true.

But what does Cuba look like from the inside, to people born there and defined by its shores? That story comes in many versions. And some of them are told by art, as can be seen in two exhibitions in New York at present: "Epic Photography of the Cuban Revolution" at the the Cuban Art Space in Chelsea, and "Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution" at Grey Art Gallery, New York University.

"Epic Photography," organized by Sandra Levinson, director of the Cuban Art Space, is a selection of documentary pictures by a few remarkable photographers who were on the spot when the revolution ignited, and the emotional heat it generated crackles through their work.

The drama actually starts with a 1955 portrait by the Cuban-born Osvald Salas (1914-1992) of a glum, exiled Fidel Castro dressed in a natty suit and tie and strolling through Central Park. There's also a second New York portrait by Mr. Salas's son Roberto, dating from 1959, by which time everything had changed. Mr. Castro, now prime minister of the Cuban Revolution, wears army fatigues and smiles and gestures with a diva's grace as he addresses the United Nations. PAGE 2 The New York Times, September 7, 2001 Meanwhile, in Havana, the photojournalist Ernesto Fernandez had caught the revolution as it happened on Jan. 1, 1959, in an extraordinary picture of clean-cut students and office clerks carrying guns for the first time. With such images, the concept of epic photography kicks in. It is nowhere more effective than in Raul Corrales's panoramic shot from 1960 of a brigade of revolutionary cavalrymen with rippling Cuban flags, advancing toward the camera at full gallop. The tableau, which could be from a 19th-century photograph, a Diego Rivera mural or a John Ford western, has the pumped-up grandeur of history painting.

The leading stylist of the heroic, though, was Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, or Korda (like many other Cuban artists, he used a one-word professional name), who was born in 1928 and died in May of this year. He was Mr. Castro's official photographer and produced many promotional portraits of him. Unsurprisingly, he came to the job through a career in fashion photography and advertising. Whether depicting Mr. Castro as a magnetic orator, a military leader or just folks, Korda paid shrewd attention to camera angle, facial expression, composition and backdrop. The idea was to create the image of a great man of action in action, an illusion of Olympian spontaneity, and he got what he was after.

His most famous portrait, however, was of Guevara, and it was a product of pure manipulation. In the original picture, Guevara was standing outdoors in a crowd intently listening to a speech. Korda cropped the negative, eliminated the other figures and isolated the handsome young man in a head shot against a patch of sky. Titled "Heroic Guerrilla," the result is an exercise in cosmetic myth-making that continues to have currency today.

An uncropped print of the Guevara picture hangs at the start of "Shifting Tides" at the Grey Art Gallery and has clearly been placed there for a reason. It exposes the conceptual machinery behind "epic" photography in order to move beyond it, and the show, organized by Tim B. Wride, associate curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, emphatically does. Mr. Wride suggests in a catalog essay that a second wave of revolution-era photographers turned away from the cult of personality to concentrate on ordinary people: the ones in pictures of cane cutters by Enrique de la Uz, in Ivan Canas's portraits of elderly veterans of the 1898 revolution, and in the festive shots of couples in a Havana dance hall by the artist and photographic historian Maria Eugenia Haya (1944-91), known as Marucha.

Then, with the work of Jose A. Figueroa, born in 1947, there's a change. This artist starts fooling around with "epic" as a category, prodding it, mocking it, shading it. In his "Sierra Road" series (1972), named for the mountains where Mr. Castro lived as a guerrilla in the late 1950's, a man on a tractor and another on horseback pass each other as if in separate worlds: so much for progress, the picture seems to say. In a 1995 shot of an impoverished Havana, men drag salvaged furniture past a billboard blowup of Korda's iconic Guevara. But with his gaze perpetually fixed on a future that never happened, he doesn't see them.

With such pictures, we leave documentary behind and link up with new Cuban photography, the show's real subject. Conceptually grounded, often multimedia in format and obliquely critical, focused on personal perception rather than historical events, the recent work is too varied to be tagged by a look or a style, and such diversity is in itself a novelty.

In his elegiac photomontage series titled "It's Only Water in the Teardrop of a Stranger" (1986), Rogelio Lopez Marin, known as Gory, superimposes images of a swimming pool, the open sea, vegetation, a battered car, and accompanies all of them with the words of a despairing poem, as if to evoke the surreal dream-state that Cuba has become. Jose Manuel Fors similarly assembles his pictures from fragments. His mandala-shaped "Great Flower" (1999) is composed of thousands of sliver-size shots of Renaissance paintings, found objects and the natural world.

Juan Carlos Alom, 36, adapts the grainy texture and introspective tone of Mr. Fors's art to emblematic still lifes that refer to Afro-Caribbean religions. Marta Maria Perez Bravo's faceless, nude self-portraits have similar cultural sources, but taken during the artist's pregnancy, they suggest disquieting rituals of self-sacrifice and self-protection.

The emotional ambiguity of Ms. Perez Bravo's pictures finds darker echoes elsewhere: in Abigail Gonzalez's mock-voyeuristic pictures of scantily clad women (the scenes are staged for the camera); in Pedro Abascal's ghostly, X-raylike architectural shapes; and in Ernesto Leal's color close-ups of dirt-catching cracks and crevices in his own apartment, which bring to mind the rot eating away at Havana's antique architecture.

Architecture also plays a part in one of the show's rare utopian moments. A two-panel piece by Carlos Garaicoa offers a photograph of a decrepit Havana building propped up with wooden braces and a drawing of the building in which the braces are replaced by figures of giant classical atlantes, implying that a falling-down city is actually supported by benign but invisible supernatural beings. Mr. Garaicoa, who recently had a one-man show at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, is full of such witty and restorative ideas. He's a wonderful artist. So is Manuel Pina, represented by a series of pictures whose very title, "Manipulation, Truths and Other Illusions," would suit both shows. The work is conceptually elaborate, based on the persona of a fictional contemporary artist who has rediscovered a forgotten 19th-century Cuban photographer. Each of Mr. Pina's three-part contributions includes an "original" 19th-century photo of a woman, the contemporary photographer's remake of that picture using a prostitute as a model, and a shot of that remake enlarged to heroic scale on a billboard advertisement for Cuban tourism. Mr. Pina's take on epic photography -- with a prostitute as hero, an artist as commercial sellout and advertising as promoter of both -- is a far cry from Korda's. Yet a piece by Mr. Pina that concludes the Grey show manages to tie 40 years of Cuban photography together, in spirit at least. It is a cinematic view of a crenelated section of the sea wall that both shelters Havana and connects it to the Atlantic. Seen in dark silhouette against the sky, it suggests the turret of a military tank, an altar, an abstract sculpture, an emblem as valorous and crushing as the revolution itself.

Mr. Pina and most of the other artists in "Shifting Tides" have not yet had New York solo shows, which makes the exhibition catalog, with its strong first-person essay by Cristina Vives, a valuable resource. It has recently been joined by a second book of wider scope edited by Holly Block, director of Art in General, a nonprofit arts organization in Manhattan. Titled "Art Cuba: The New Generation" (Harry N. Abrams), it covers work in various media and includes critical contributions by the curator Gerardo Mosquera and the artist Antonio Eligio, known as Tonel.

Good as they are, both books are still only a handful of essays with pictures, just as the exhibitions are mere samplings of much larger bodies of material. Cuban art, like the island itself, has changed radically in the last half century and is changing still. Now it's time for someone to give that dynamic process the big-picture historical treatment it deserves. "Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution" is on view at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University, 100 Washington Square East, Greenwich Village, (212) 998-6780. "Epic Photography of the Cuban Revolution" is at the Cuban Art Space, 124 West 23rd Street, Chelsea, (212) 242-0559. Both remain on view through Oct. 27.

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GRAPHIC: Photos: Gory's "It's Only Water in the Teardrop of a Stranger," left, at the Grey Art Gallery; Fidel Castro, above, in a 1959 portrait by Roberto Salas at Cuban Art Space. (Grey Art Gallery; top right, Cuban Art Space)(pg. E29); "Caballeria" by Raul Corrales, at the Cuban Art Space. (Couturier Gallery, Los Angeles); At Grey Art Gallery: Havana dance-hall couple by Maria Eugenia Haya. (The Cuban Art Space of the Center for Cuban Studies)(pg. E31)