THE OTHER CUBA

Over the past few years, an unforeseen intersection of global and local circumstances has reinvigorated Cuba’s creative and alternative subcultures like never before. Due to strict Covid-19 lockdowns in Cuba and renewed U.S. sanctions, few overseas visitors have witnessed this vibrant Internet-driven renaissance. For viewers accustomed to Cuba’s depiction as just cigars, vintage cars, all-inclusive resorts, and Cold War echoes, The Other Cuba photo essay promises an inspiring wake-up slap. For The Other Cuba series, I elected to work at the confluence of documentary photography and the cinematic conceptual fictions of lens-based artists that I admire such as Gregory Crewdson, Jeff Wall, Alex Prager, and Stan Douglas. For this reason, I approached this project as a documentarist would to uncover social truths and facts but also maintained a subjective license to imbue my images with constructed narratives. To do so, I embedded myself deep in the Cuban counter-culture and collaborated with my subjects to imagine how they would be represented to better reflect their alternative lifestyles and cultural ethos. Please note that I will donate back to LensCulture any prize money I can win to further your mission to help my fellow photographers who need it more than I do. My objective is to obtain visibility for this body of work, not financial support.