HAVANA, CUBA The Image of Havana

CITY #1 THE AESTHETIC IMAGE
Classic cars, crumbling architecture, fat cigars, dark rum, and despotic leaders. These are the images that Havana evokes to an outsider. Analyzing the effects of the external gaze, aesthetics, distance, and the role of photography, these images reveal a city that has become more real in its fantastical image than in its reality.
CITY #2 THE EMBODIED IMAGE
The images found within Havana tell complex stories of patriotism, propaganda, self-expression, and cultural identity. They are powerful in ways that either command their audience into deference or empower the questioning of the status quo. Try as a government might to muffle and censor free speech, Cuban-authored images persist and find a way to prevail using calculated and clever means, revealing a city that is actively pursuing an identity of its own creation.
Architecture, and our understanding of it, is deeply rooted in the visual and the information we attain from the aesthetic experience. Using the eye of an architect, this work begins to understand how representations are complicit in not only passively representing a city but also in actively creating one.