CUBA: singing with bright tears Review

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CUBA: singing with bright tears ReviewBeahan's photographs capture the sense and the appearance of emptiness in Cuba. As the noted travel essayist Pico Iyer sees it, "The real seduction of Cuba...lies precisely in that kind of impromptu makeshift quality, and in the fact that it feels so deserted: the whole island has the ramshackle glamour of an abandoned stage set." This is not to say there isn't some color, some vitality, some distinctiveness. But as Iyer suggests and Beahan's photographs convey, this is all surface. There's no depth, no momentum. Even the murals and pictures of important and noted public figures in Cuba's history and culture such as Castro seem hollow and vaguely forlorn, as if wanly hoping someone would look at them.
Most of Beahan's photographs do not have people in them. But they're not nature photographs. For reminders of people are strewn throughout them and in some photos, are the subject. The photograph Bahia de Cochinos (Bay of Pigs) of a rocky shore and haze-filled seascape has at its right side a walkway and ladder dropping into the water. A rooftop pigeon coop has a drawing of a bird on the large circular water container and a tilted large woven basket--links to an unpictured person's hobby of raising pigeons. The several photos of billboards have slogans and other writings, but no one reading them.
The photographs are highly skilled. They have to be to fix such poise of emptiness. The skill is not only rooted in Beahan's eye. If it were, her photographs would amount to little more than symbolism (as instructive and worthy as this can be). More germane to the exceptional quality of the photographs is Beahan's artful though understated sense of composition. In realistic photos such as these, this can be unrealized by the viewer. This sense is not related only or even primarily to what is within the frame overall, but reaches to specific colors and forms within the general content. Beahan's photo "Tourist cabins at Playa Giron, 2004," for instance, with its flat-roofed, rectangular lighter blue cabins against a slate sky and facing out on an empty yard and a leafless tree could be a modernist-type art photograph with its contrasts of colors and forms. Facing photographs with the single title "North coast, Gibara, 2007" looking out to sea at dusk with deep blue colors could be taken as somewhat experimental and abstract for the amorphous rock formations in the foreground and the luminosity throughout the photo. Such effects come only from advanced skill in development.
Beahan clearly did not simply gambol around Cuba clicking her camera on everything that caught her fancy. Combining knowledge of subject directing her what to keep her eyes open for, sensibility, and technical skill, one sees photographs that hold Cuba's state of suspension in the final years of Castro's rule while also displaying high accomplishment sheerly as photography.
CUBA: singing with bright tears Overview
"Virginia Beahan is one of our most accomplished and eloquent photographers. Her images remind us that the best landscapes have as much to tell us about history and culture as they do about topography. Looking at CUBA singing with bright tears, I am heartened to see that it is still possible to make a perfect photograph."—Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, Smithsonian American Art Museum
CUBA singing with bright tears depicts a country both tragic and beautiful, struggling beneath the weight of history. Larger-than-life images of revolutionary heroes Che Guevara and José Martí populate the island. The Bay of Pigs is sublime and treacherous; an atmospheric body of water rimmed with jagged black coral is the same unwelcoming shore that greeted invading CIA-trained Cuban exiles over forty-seven years ago. On a billboard, Fidel Castro reminds us that the US might invade again, and if so, he "will die fighting."
Virginia Beahan's work falls within the tradition of great American photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Adams. Her luminous and detailed large-format photographs reveal a landscape imbued with nuanced stories of culture shaped by geography and human action. Cuba's long and complicated relationship with the United States is part of this unfolding drama.
Virginia Beahan's photographs are in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, San Francisco MoMA, the Getty Museum, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Corcoran in Washington, DC. She has received grants from the Guggenheim and Mellon foundations. Beahan teaches photography at Dartmouth College. Her collaborative monograph, No Ordinary Land, was published by Aperture in 1998.


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