Viewing Room – Crane Kalman Brighton

Photographs 1990-1996 PART II

THE CUBA ARCHIVE - TRIA GIOVAN

To mark 30 years since the first publication of Cuba: The Elusive Island, we are pleased to present the second exhibition of Tria Giovan’s comprehensive study of Cuba in the 1990s. The 120 images in Tria Giovan’s The Cuba Archive are from the period in the 1990s when, as an American, travel to Cuba could have seen Giovan branded a traitor, as the country was subject to a US trade embargo. Her trip required lots of planning – and patience, but the photographer continued to visit and, from the dance hall to the hair salon, she captured the resilient spirit of the Cuban people.

Giovan set out to capture the people’s resilience, during what Fidel Castro, with typical hyperbole, called the “special period”. Giovan arrived in 1990, a few months after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and kept returning over the next six years. ‘Having grown up in the Virgin Islands,’ says Giovan, ‘I was searching for a place to photograph that had escaped homogenisation and commercialisation. Inaccessible, forbidden and enigmatic, Cuba shone like a beacon. With that first trip, I knew Cuba was everything I was looking for.’

‘On the streets of Havana,’ writes journalist Silvana Paternostro in the book’s foreword, ‘even the simplest tasks have become a struggle, and the search for basic goods has become so urgent that everyday Spanish has given way to a vocabulary of crisis. The verbs for “to find”, “to get”, and even “to have” have merged together into one: “resolver” meaning “to resolve” or, better yet, “to solve”.’

Giovan’s shots capture how life goes on in the face of shortages, long queues, petrol deficits, and buildings held up by feeble scaffoldings. In Castro’s Cuba, aesthetic beauty goes hand in hand with a sense of deterioration, isolation and loss. ‘On that first trip in 1990,’ says Giovan, ‘I sensed a country teetering on some precipice. I ran out of film in a couple of days. Everything was interesting. I’d see someone I’d like to shoot. So I’d ask and I’d always get a “Sure, why not?” And then something I had never experienced happened when I raised my camera – their expression didn’t change.

Giovan stopped photographing the island in 1996. Castro would die 20 years later without ever announcing the end of his special period. ‘It’s easy to romanticise Cuba,’ says Giovan, ‘but with romance there is always some suffering.’

When the photographer returned to the island seventeen years later on an assignment for the Annenberg Foundation and in conjunction with the exhibition Cuba IS, the country she encountered was visually much different. “There was a charged vitality in the streets that felt youthful, alive,” she says. This is perhaps the perfect epilogue for the land. For it makes it somehow more comfortable to view the tough times depicted in the book, knowing that its resilient protagonists make it through them. Perhaps even dreaming is now allowed on this Caribbean island…

Raised in the Caribbean, Giovan has travelled the world on photography assignments, and her work has been published in Aperture, Esquire, Harpers, Travel & Leisure, Vogue and many other publications. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and is held in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Parrish Art Museum, and The NY Public Library, among others institutions and private collections. Photographs from The Cuba Archive were featured in Cuba Is, an exhibition at the Annenberg Space for Photography, LA in 2018 and as part of The Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, an exploration of Latin American and Latino Art.

Four monographs of her work have been published to date: Cuba The Elusive Island by Harry N. Abrams in 1996, Sand Sea Sky by Damiani in 2012, The Cuba Archive Photographs 1990 to 1996 by Damiani in 2017, and Loisaida New York Street Work 1984 – 1990 by Damiani in 2023.

prints Available to purchase

Billboard with Che, Havana, Cuba, 1993
El Elegante Servicentro, Havana, Cuba, 1993
Paseo del Prado y Neptuno, Havana, Cuba, 1993
Casa de Dulce Maria Loynas, Vedado, Cuba, 1993
El Malecon, Havana, Cuba, 1994
Beach Gathering, Santa Maria del Mar, Mantanzas, Cuba, 1993
Father and Daughters on the Malecon, Havana, Cuba, 1993
Woman Waiting in Polyclinic, Molguba, Cuba, 1995
Che Plays Chess, Mantanzas, Cuba, 1993
Waiting Bike, Boyeros, Cuba, 1993
Birds Cage at Coppelia Park, Havana, Cuba, 1992
Girl With Dog and Sponge, Caibarien, Cuba, 1992
Parrot on a Perch, Mayari, Cuba, 1992
Couples Swimming, Holguin, Cuba, 1993
Woman and Child Sleeping, Holguin, Cuba, 1993
Electrodomestico, Bayamo, Cuba, 1990
Selling Maranon, Punta de Maisi, Cuba, 1992
Fighting Fish in Agilar, Camaguey, Cuba, 1992
Boys on a Brdige, Baracoa, Cuba, 1993
Young Couple in Remedios, Cuba, 1993
Astral Theater, Havana, Cuba, 1993
Dominoes, Santiago de Cuba, Cuba, 1992
Dancing, Isabela de Sagua, Cuba, 1993