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Capturing Old Havana
By Glenn McNatt, Sun Art
Critic. Published April 13, 2006 in The
Baltimore Sun.
Ever since Walker Evans created his classic
series of portraits from pre-Revolutionary
Havana during the early 1930s, American
photographers have had a love affair with
the land and people of Cuba.
Evans brought to his Cuban portraits an
uncompromising realism in the depiction
of ordinary, working-class folk, along with
an appreciation for the elegant, Spanish-style
architecture and bustling street life of
their city. In the days before color film
was practical for documentary work, Evans
was able to endow his seemingly artless
black-and-white images with an unmistakable
aura of tropical light and color.
Photographer Rose Cromwell, a recent Maryland
Institute College of Art graduate whose
atmospheric photographs of Old Havana are
on view in the downstairs gallery in the
school's main building, harks back to the
humanistic tradition of Evans. Her pictures
record the small but significant gestures
in the everyday life of a people that end
up speaking volumes about the soul of a
place.
Cromwell spent more than two months this
year in the Jovellar y Infanta neighborhood
of Old Havana, a community she first encountered
during a chance visit in 2004. Although
the Seattle native doesn't speak fluent
Spanish, she was able to establish relationships
of trust with people there that allowed
her to visit and photograph them in their
homes. The 26 photographs in the exhibition
are all set in intimate domestic interiors,
where Cromwell's subjects seem completely
at ease in front of the camera.
For the documentary photographer, social
skills are at least as important as mastery
of camera technique. One has to be able
to make people comfortable in one's presence,
and also show that one really cares about
who they are. Only then are they likely
to reveal something of their inner selves.
The quality of empathy cannot be taught
in art school, yet it is a gift all great
documentarians share. Cromwell somehow has
persuaded her subjects to trust her implicitly,
and it is this trust, more than any formal
properties the pictures may possess, that
persuades us of the truth of our encounter
with them.
Like Evans' work, Cromwell's pictures seem
at first as artless as snapshots. A girl
stretches her arms after rising from bed;
a young man in his room methodically curls
weights; a woman resting on concrete steps
gazes pensively toward an open doorway.
Only later does one realize that it is the
quality of the light itself, which illuminates
Cromwell's subjects like some poetic, indescribably
tender unveiling of the soul, that is the
true subject of her pictures. It is the
light of the life of a people, and one leaves
this lovely exhibition convinced that it
is also the only thing that really matters.
"Jovellar y Infanta: Portraits from
Central Havana" runs through Monday.
The gallery is in the main building at MICA,
1300 W. Mount Royal Ave. Call 410-225-2300.
Copyright © 2006, The
Baltimore Sun
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