Cuban photography

Abstract

Perhaps meaning in Cuban photography has been tied to context more than is the case in other cultures. An island crossroads, Cuba was among the first Latin American nations to receive the foreign harbingers of this invention in 1840, and early daguerreotypes - as well as pictorialist portraits made by other techniques - were produced for those who could afford them. It could be argued that Cuban photography only really begins to deal with that country's reality during the Spanish-Cuban-American War of 1895-98.² There, images of emaciated Cuban civilians, starved and mistreated in the Spanish concentration camps, both marked the beginnings of ‘critical realism’ and signalled the complexities that would surround photography in this culture. To Cubans, these photographs were a stimulus in struggling against the atrocities of colonial rule; to the US government, they offered simply one more excuse to invade the island and replace the Spanish flag with the Stars and Stripes.