ustxtxb_obs_2003_01_17_50_00027-00000_000.pdf

From Shifting Tides It’s Only Water in the Teardrop of a Stranger, 1986. Original in color; ABOVE: Juan Carlos Alom, Only You Fit in the Palm of My Hand, 1977; From Havana in My Heart: BELOW: Orlando Martinez Maqueira, Chucho close-up, 1991 \(Cuban musician and latin jazz In the text that accompanies the book, Jenkins writes about the creation of art schools and the evolution of the plastic and visual arts in Cuba, but he doesn’t seem to think about photography as an art in itself. He includes photographic portraits of fine artists, and there are plenty of graphically interesting, beautifully composed pictures, but there aren’t really any photographs that were made as fine art. On the other hand, Shifting Tides is concerned more with the art history of Cuban photography than with photographs of history. Wride divides the pictures according to the interests of what he sees as four broad evolutionary generations of Cuban photographers: The Cult of Personality, Everyday Heroes, Collective Memory, and Siting the Self. In the first generation, photographers celebrated the great leaders and heroes of the Revolution. Alberto Diaz Gutierrez, who is known as Korda, is one of the icons of this first generation. Korda began his career as a high-society fashion and advertising photographer. In 1959 he joined the Revolution. Eventually, he became Fidel’s personal photographer and shot “Heroic Guerilla,” the portrait of 1/17/03 THE TEXAS OBSERVER 27