All art that calls itself Cuban, whether or not made in Cuba, bears the seal of the country’s history and the existential drama of its inhabitants. Its creators have not succeeded in resisting the need to issue judgment on that history or simply identify themselves in it. It is an unavoidable art-life-society interconnection. About Her, about Me, and about Them is a way of thinking about part of that recent history through photography. This exhibition is an unfinished trilogy about a country in permanent construction.

About Her… Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (Korda) (La Habana 1928 – Paris, 2001) represents the transit in which Cuba went from modernity to contemporariness in social and political terms, and of those initial years when the triumphant Revolution of 1959 found in photography its best ally for sending its emancipative message to the world. We are not referring to the images of leaders and political events that made Korda famous but to his photographs of beautiful women made between 1954 and 1968. The original purpose of these was fashion and advertising, but they later became a personal obsession to find the feminine beauty in the new political scenarios of the Revolution. Korda’s women thus evolve from the glamour and bohemian life of Havana in the 1950s to the beauty – described by the artist as “of a new type” – which he discovered in the photographs of militia women participating in the political rallies of the early 1960s.

About Me…René Peña (La Habana, 1957) emerged in the Cuban photographic scene in the late 1980s, old enough to recall the revolutionary epic but not to feel it as his own. His generation was destined to live through the collapse of the geographical cartography of international socialism. Peña was born in a time of utopia and lived through the years that led to its dissolution. Those were years in which artists’ themes and the objects of their research changed from the collective to the personal, and the role of the individual gained risky prominence. René Peña’s generation became sarcastic, and issued critical judgment through simulation. Each of the scenes constructed by Peña to date is a structure of the thoughts contained in his own body, where the different acts of the history he was destined to live are represented. Independent of his own will, Peña acts as a highly social individual marked by the material circumstances, the arbitrariness, the double moral, the intolerance, the loss of values, the gender conflicts, and the social inequalities of his country’s recent past.

About Them…Alejandro González (La Habana, 1974) was born when everything still seemed to indicate that a better future was possible. He grew up waiting for that promised future. His photos explore the empty spaces of untold stories or social segments that were not represented in the official photography. Capturing events and people not considered eligible by the powerful, the artist unveils historical gaps avoided by power. Using actors and reconstructing scenarios, he photographs truths that were concealed from us. Each of his series is the result of rigorous historical research. His photographs weaken the political ritual, use irony to expose the economic fantasies, unveil the ruins, make evident the rhetoric and the demagogy, and point out the mistakes. He can do this from the distance granted to him by virtue of his not being a witness of the events. That enables him to tell us about “them” from a perspective we feel is closer to objectivity.