Michael Eastman

Michael Eastman New/OldCuba

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Michael Eastman

New/OldCuba

William Shearburn Gallery

Rediscovering Cuba’s Secrets

~Paul Strand

By Jeannette Cooperman

The winter light was cold and flat, so Michael Eastman set his camera aside, reached deep, and pulled out a pile of old four-by-five negatives. He regularly goes back through old shoots, deconstructing them to learn from the choices he made once the emotions of the shoot have cooled. But for two decades, his Cuba portfolio had waited, preserved but untouched, in his studio freezer.

The delay made poetic sense; he had gone to Cuba because the entire country was frozen in time. Anywhere in Havana, it was—still and always—1959. He traveled there five times, beginning in 1999, and stayed two exhausting weeks each time, mustering enough Spanish and earning enough trust to enter the city’s interiors.

The blockade had forced even the grandest homes into disrepair, and Fidel Castro’s new regime had stripped their occupants of money and social standing. Paint was peeling from those damp palatial walls, acanthus leaves falling from the plaster mouldings. Eastman’s photographs—huge and painterly, the faded colors glowing—caught the imagination of collectors in Paris, Turkey, London….

Now, laying the four-by-fives in rows on his light table, he pushed aside the spiral staircase image that was chosen as the poster for Paris Photo 2015. He lingered over the images of Isabella’s crumbling mansion, then pushed them aside as well. This time, he wanted to focus on the quieter shots, the simple bedrooms and kitchens of people who did their own cooking and cleaning and maybe someone else’s, too.

There were secrets in the details, themes he had never registered before. He did a quick sort, separating the negatives like a casino dealer. Then he put several dozen through his

“Yourphotographyisarecordofyourliving,foranyonewhoreallysees.”

high-res scanner. As they appeared on his monitor, he felt the old thrill again, the elation of watching images emerge on a wet sheet of paper in the darkroom and knowing he hadsomething.

Compared to his first Havana series, these images were at once simpler and more vivid, drenched in feeling. The grander images had been formal, symmetrical, exquisite, and sad, their ruined elegance underscoring a poignant emptiness. But these shots, also of empty rooms, were warm with human presence. There was more light, more color. The bedrooms were private refuges, not showplaces designed to convey certain qualities. Objects were displayed for love, not show. Stories hid in every corner.

Excited, Eastman began editing—the least glamorous stage of any art form, and the most crucial. These images should be big, he decided, but not at the monumental scale he often favored. Known for his breathtaking architectural work, he had printed previous interiors and facades (Cuba, Rome, Paris, Tokyo, New Orleans) almost life-sized, inviting viewers to enter the space both visually and metaphorically. So much of the interest lay in (and just beneath) the surfaces, in their textures and patterns and timeworn edges, in the play of light, in tiny motifs or carvings so often overlooked.

Self-taught, Eastman had been inspired by photography’s early purists. When he began, he read TheDaybooksofEdward Weston every night, turning them into a meditation. He absorbed Weston’s reflections on “a new light-world,” uncharted and waiting to be discovered. He took to heart Weston’s desire to present things exactly as they are—but capture their essence as he did so. Decades later, Weston’s voice was still in his head: “The photograph isolates and perpetuates a moment of time.” Weston dismissed “soft gutless painting” as incapable of boring into the contemporary world, but Eastman set out to fuse the two mediums. He wanted to paint with his camera. By making his images luminous, meticulously refined, and huge, he gave them the glowing presence and gravitas of oil paintings.

Because Eastman had usually photographed early in the morning, the light in these images is thin, clear, and hazed with

dust. Doorways open into rooms with doorways into other rooms, drawing you into a family’s life. In Blue Bedroom, the walls are cloudless sky, surrounding a narrow, austere bed whose occupant is watched over every night by a framed icon of Mary and baby Jesus. The floor is cool tile, patterned in turquoise and coral; the room dark and sunlit at once. Bar Is Open offers makeshift luxury: bright red pots and pans sit, inexplicably, atop an old cabinet, along with a red plastic palm tree cocktail straw, a green syrup bottle, plastic roses. Champagne glasses have been carefully placed upside down in a rack, and whimsical toy critters dangle from its shelf. Water stains turn the ceiling oceanic and abstract.

Eastman scrolled through his selections again, noticing a Big Ben alarm clock, fat on splayed legs; Space Age television sets, bulky, their corners rounded; posters of John Lennon and Che Guevara; a chandelier’s naked, burned-out lightbulbs reflected in a small mirror; a giant smudge on the wall, shaped like a ghost; a ceiling painted the saturated sky blue that in the southern U.S. goes on porches for good luck. Other colors, intensely alive: emerald green, bright coral, yellow as fresh as churned butter. Floor tiles adding geometry: black and white checkerboards, Moroccan designs, cream and black Art Deco patterns.

Editing these new-old images, Eastman felt almost embarrassed. How could he have missed this quieter beauty? He remembered how overwhelmed he’d been when he first arrived in Havana, unsure where to start. On that first trip, he had stumbled upon a palatial home, set back on a tree-lined street just past a row of embassies. There was a huge hole in the green vitrolite roof, as though a meteor had crashed. “I walked up and asked if I could photograph the interior,” he recalls, “and I came home with one of the most remarkable pictures I’d ever made.” Isabella had welcomed him into her home, proud to have that photograph made. He called it Isabella’sTwoChairs . Its crumbling elegance was poignant, combining earlier luxury with dignity and resolve. Her family’s entire history dwelt in that room.

From there, Eastman went looking for more stories that complex and operatic, more interiors that grand. He hired a driver, a former soldier who’d been in the bunker during the

Cuban missile crisis. The driver would knock on doors for him, asking permission of various homeowners. Invited in, Eastman would look slowly through the home. If he felt nothing, he would find a polite excuse—“Your home is in too good a shape!”—and leave. Sometimes, though, he felt more than he understood, and he shot without knowing exactly why.

Those were the images he was seeing now, as though for the first time. The grander homes had shown a way of life that was dying, but these humbler homes were full of life, love, and faith. Sometimes faith in Fidel, a religion unto himself. Often, faith in Jesus and the Virgin Mary, the statuettes defiantly displayed. Always, faith in Cuba, the country they loved with a ferocity he was only beginning to understand.

People were reluctant to talk about Castro’s regime, which had seemed like salvation in the beginning. Promises had not been kept. Members of the former elite had been thrown into prison, accused of collaborating with the CIA. Many fled their homes, sometimes hiding keepsakes beneath the stairs or floorboards before they left. Priests were killed. Yet Catholicism soaked these humbler interiors, Jesus standing with his arms outstretched in effortless welcome, crucifixes hung as reminders of a larger sacrifice.

Peering around corners and into back rooms, you become the gentlest sort of voyeur, a houseguest up before everyone else. Every picture tells at least one story. In Portrait Havana, a vivid wall is broken by a doorway sized for a skinny giant, and a faded terra cotta column divides what we are supposed to look at from what we want to explore, that room to the right with its chairs and tv set and midcentury light fixture, sassy and secretive. Reluctantly, we return to the focal point and see how beautiful it is, those ivories and that dark golden yellow, the pattern and shadow leading your eye past the first intimacy to the next.

RedCouch,Havanashows off filigreed gothic doors, like confessionals but spotlit. In the foreground, a chair of crimson velvet so bright it could live in a bordello, and on it a further defiance, a yellow throw pillow ruffled in orange. Who watches this tv set, hidden by a huge flowerpot? Have children burst out

of their baby picture frames and grown up by now? And why is Fidel tilting toward us—is that his political stance or do we blame his patched economy? Who is the Indianchief?

You can look at these images every day and keep finding a new question, a surprising detail, fresh insight.

Images from a music school show a row of red chairs, stuffing bubbling out of torn cushions, lined up and ready for the students. Here the light is natural and cool, softening without offering reprieve. “Brio,” a conductor has urged, demanding a melody as full of energy as the room’s past. On a wood paneled wall, someone has chalked “Quien no ama no tiene sentimentos completes”: “Who does not love does not have complete feelings.”

YellowBedroomWithFanis a room where you can easily imagine sleeping, then waking to breakfast in the adjoining kitchen, its sturdy table already set with centerpiece and breadbasket. It is spring forever, with these newborn greens and buttercup yellows. Sunlight streams through the louvers.

“There was such pride and care in those rooms,” Eastman says. Instead of heirlooms and Venetian glass and gold-framed oil paintings, there are cherished portraits, reading glasses on top of a book, slippers waiting beside the bed. There is wear, and there have been tears, but any sense of decay or tragedy is swept away by resilience.

Lately, many of these layered, peeling, intensely colored walls have been whitewashed, the young owners eager for a fresh start. Havana is thawing. But Eastman’s images capture all those years when it was 1959.

Quiet, yet charged with emotion, these photographs needed years to cool. And he needed years, too. “Finally I was able to stop and see what was in front of me,” he says. “People had loved the grand images, so there was a kind of prejudice I had to overcome before I could see the story in the other images.

Now, he marvels at the simpler shots, because “they hold

so much information. When I took them, I was responding without understanding. Now I see ideas fully realized, themes I missed because I was looking for something else.” He shrugs, grins ruefully. “I wouldn’t have seen these twenty years ago. I wasn’t wise enough yet.”

Anaward-winningjournalist,JeannetteCoopermanwritesforThe CommonReader,ajournaloftheessaybasedatWashingtonUniversity.SheholdsadoctorateinAmericanstudiesandamaster’s focusedonthevisualarts.

All works are: C-prints taken in 1999 and printed in 2022, 77 x 60 inches

Michael Eastman has established himself as one of the world’s leading contemporary photographic artists. The self-taught photographer has spent five decades documenting interiors and facades in cities as diverse as Havana, Paris, Rome, and New Orleans, producing largescale photographs unified by their visual precision, monumentality, and painterly use of color. Eastman is most recognized for his explorations of architectural form and the textures of decay, which create mysterious narratives about time and place.

Eastman’s photographs have appeared in Time , Life , Art in America , Art News , Art Forum , CommunicationArtsand AmericanPhotographer , and they reside in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the International Center of Photography, The Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and other prestigious institutions. His books include Havana (2011, Prestel), Vanishing America (2008, Rizzoli) and Horses (2003, Knopf).