Shifting Tides is the first large anthology of contemporary Cuban photography that took place in different museums of the United States. It deserved the intelligent curatorial work of Tim B. Wride, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and the research and collaboration of the Cuban based curator Cristina Vives. Both traced a select journey that drew 40 years of Cuban photography since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. It was conceived as a generational and thematic sequence, structured by means of a reduced Foreword section room (including some iconic images by the photographers Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez (Korda), Osvaldo Salas and epoch documents that mentioned to “the cult to the personality” that, in the curator´s opinion, characterized the epic photography of the beginning of the Cuban 60´s.

The exhibition also has three sections divided as follows: “The First Generation. Everyday Heroes” with extensive photographic series by José A. Figueroa, Iván Cañas, Enrique de la Uz, Rigoberto Romero and María Eugenia Haya (Marucha) representing the social, anthropological and documentary vocation of the Cuban photography of the 70´s; “The Second Generation: Collective Memory” with assays and installations by Rogelio López Marín (Gory), Juan Carlos Alom, Marta María Pérez Bravo and José Manuel Fors, whom marked the entrance of the Cuban photography to the international contemporary Art in the 80´s. They played with an introspective, metaphoric look, relative to personal experiences and inheritances of identity and memory, but in turn, more universal. And lastly: “The Current Generation: Sitting the Self”, with photographic series and installations by Pedro Abascal, Manuel Piña, Carlos Garaicoa, Abigail González and Ernesto Leal. This last section showed the interdisciplinary artists’s tryning and the common denominator of conceptualism as language.

The homonymous book (Merrel Publishers, London, 2001, ISBN 1-85894-134-2) with assays of Wride and Vives and Foreword by Wim Wenders, is considered an academic text in Universities of Cuba and the United States.