CUBA
Singing with Bright Tears
Virginia Beahan

Hardbound, 13" x 11", 162 pages
97 color illustrations
2009, Pond Press
Contributions from John Lee Anderson and Pico Iyer

From the Publisher:
“Virginia Beahan is one of our most accomplished and eloquent photographers. Her images remind us that the best landscapes have as much to tell us about history and culture as they do about topography. Looking at CUBA singing with bright tears, I am heartened to see that it is still possible to make a perfect photograph.”—Toby Jurovics, curator of photography, Smithsonian American Art Museum

CUBA singing with bright tears depicts a country both tragic and beautiful, struggling beneath the weight of history. Larger-than-life images of revolutionary heroes Che Guevara and José Martí populate the island. The Bay of Pigs is sublime and treacherous; an atmospheric body of water rimmed with jagged black coral is the same unwelcoming shore that greeted invading CIA-trained Cuban exiles over forty-seven years ago. On a billboard, Fidel Castro reminds us that the US might invade again, and if so, he “will die fighting.”

Virginia Beahan’s work falls within the tradition of great American photographers such as Walker Evans and Robert Adams. Her luminous and detailed large-format photographs reveal a landscape imbued with nuanced stories of culture shaped by geography and human action. Cuba’s long and complicated relationship with the United States is part of this unfolding drama.