To See Things as They Are

El Morro: the picturesque fort built to protect Havana from English attacks

“The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” This quote struck me not only in my thoughts of my future excursion to Cuba, but also in how I want to capture the city. The program that I am doing in Havana is a photography program through Tisch, and while I will be taking Spanish classes and learning about the culture, art and history of Cuba, my main focus is photographic.
When I try to visualize Havana, I come up with a romantic vision a dilapidated city on the beach, a place caught between old and new. Google images of the coast and rusty 1950s cars stand to support this imaginary image, but these images seem a little hollow. Hollow not because I think that they don’t exist, but I can take no real sense of place from them. It’s not the whole picture.
Cuba has tourist attractions, but their images are not as ubiquitous as those of the Taj Mahal in India or the leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy. Some of Havana’s attractions are el Morro, the historic fort and lighthouse, and La Plaza de Armas. Because Cuba has been cut-off from the United States, it has been spared what Mike Crang calls “the structure of expectation…where the pictures circulating around sites are more important than the sights themselves.” The Plaza de Armas is a tourist attraction, but it’s meaning is derived from its place in living history rather than its amount of stars in a guidebook.
I have very few expectations of life in Havana, simply because I don’t know what to expect. Cuba is a place shrouded in mystery, a place that I never thought I would visit, let alone live in, for four months. I have some images of life in Cuba—rusty 1950s American cars, girls dancing, tropical fauna and the beach—but these images are strictly two-dimensional. They are a blank slate. These images on Google pop up without context, they come without implication of smell, sound or meaning.
I see the dilemma of the “tourist gaze,” and the proposed dearth of meaning in a photograph that has been taken, and reproduced a million times before. And yet, I have to agree with Crang that capturing the world through photography is not just a way to trap moments in order to remember, share or flaunt them, but rather a way to “establish realities” and interact with the world around me.
I’m sure that while in Havana I will photograph places that others have photographed before, but I hope that after four months of living there my photographs will speak to my own unique experienceA Cuban Road: Old American cars left over from before the Revolution..