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Cuban construct
In his portraits of Havana, photographer Robert Polidori captures the architecture of cubanidad
BY SALLY CRAGIN

In THE PORTRAIT by photographer Robert Polidori, there is no shortage of books in the Havana residence of Señora Luisa Faxas. What captures the eye in her worn but once-elegant 1920s drawing room is how neatly, if precariously, the books are stored on a generic 1960s metal desk. In another room, just visible beyond a pair of French doors, more books sit on shelves that are also on the verge of collapse. No signs of life? You’re not done looking; there’s a bicycle in yet a third chamber, with a clothesline stretched overhead. This is Cuba as noted New Yorker photographer Polidori sees it — a place of paradoxes. Elegance fused with ruin, yet bristling with traces of vitality.

"Havana: Photographs by Robert Polidori" is currently on view at Peabody Essex Museum. It’s Polidori’s first solo museum show, and the work is both documentary and fine-art photography. He’s made numerous trips to Cuba and photographed interiors and exteriors, along the way meeting a number of residents. Some remain in the elegant homes they occupied before la revolución. Others are workers who have made homes in subdivided residences.

In Polidori’s 18 enormous color-saturated images, narrative constantly bursts forth. In the Faxas residence, there are few straight lines — just the edges of the books, the open French doors, and the marble tiles. The remainder of the space is soft surfaces and crumbling plaster. Beneath a painting hanging askew, its canvas torn, a pair of worn easy chairs await visitors whom one suspects seldom arrive.

Polidori has found a veritable pentimento of decay here. Some of the water-stained plaster on the ceiling has vanished, revealing the lathing beneath. Closer scrutiny might prompt worry in an observer. What about that tarnished chandelier, crystals glinting gamely through the dust — can the chain really hold? It’s a composition reminiscent of other interiors — grandes salles by the master painters of the Belle Époque. This visual allusion is intentional, according to the Canadian-born photographer, reached by phone in Gottingen, Germany, where he’s working on his latest book.

"In my early development, I was very interested in old Italian paintings and old French paintings," Polidori explains. "I also liked Persian miniatures and Arab miniatures, and there’s a lot of painterly history that I’ve integrated within my eye, since I use a view camera and use a lot of perspective correction, which Italian painting also did. This sounds arrogant, but I can make almost anything look painterly."

Polidori’s work displayed at Peabody Essex is both monumental and busy with small details. "Some will see here morbid indiscretion, others indispensable honesty," writes historian/architect Eduardo Luis Rodríguez in his preface to Robert Polidori: Havana (Steidl Publishing, 2001). "In Polidori’s painstaking compositions, nothing enters by chance."

"There are many ways to interpret Robert’s work, but looking at the images with an eye on the subject matter of the buildings was a way of really understanding a place — Havana and a culture," says Elizabeth Padjen, consulting curator of architecture and design at the Peabody Essex. "The photographs really explore the whole notion of cubanidad, which means ‘Cubanness,’ or the essence of Cuban identity."

Though there are portraits of people integrated in his work, Polidori’s eye for architectural forms is "most captivating," says Padjen. "Robert’s photographs capture the story of Havana’s architecture through the 1959 revolution," she explains. "So you can look at it as architectural history, but what also makes these photographs special is they took that subject matter and brought to it another sensibility. He looks at these scenes and somehow understands the way people have responded to these environments and the way these environments have influenced the people who live in them."

Of course, shooting such evocative subjects in a remote place requires both intense planning and serendipity. Because Polidori holds a French passport, it’s not a problem for him to enter Cuba, with which the US has had a trade embargo for decades. "It’s easy for anyone to go who’s not American, though many Americans do go there," Polidori says. "I’ve met many there. It was easy before, because all you had to do was transit by a third country, but post-9/11, most planes that go to Cuba have to submit a passenger manifest so the government knows who is there."

Once there, Polidori says, "I just walk around. I have good intuition on how to find [good photographic subjects], and the people in Cuba are so easy to make friends with. I go up to them and ask permission to go in, and usually we can work it out. The second way is, I always try to have good contacts within that country. But sometimes you get things really randomly, like one residence that was brought to me by my driver."

In Cuba, architectural styles range from neoclassical, which incorporates themes and forms from ancient Greece and Rome, to eclectic, which can combine numerous and seemingly disparate styles. Some of the most startling are those built just after Cuba became a republic in the early 20th century, "when people were building mansions," says Padjen. "They were proud of their standing in the world and also wanted to indicate their stature and standing by using a lot of historical and classical motifs. That’s something that happened in our country too, after our revolution." Yet despite the formal traditions underlying the local building techniques, numerous adaptations were made to promote cubanidad. "Cuban details include shuttered windows and high ceilings and marble floors to keep things cool," says Padjen.

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Issue Date: August 20 - 26, 2004
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