Imágenes del desasosiego

Resum

Images of Uneasiness: The work of Manuel Piña (Havana, 1958) begins in the 1990’s during the notorious “special period in peacetime”, one of the toughest times since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Despite the crudeness of this serious political and economic crisis, Manuel and many other artists were, in some way, encouraged and decided to express, through their work, the serious incidents derived from this crisis. Aided by the winds of renewal experienced by Cuban art of the eighties, the poetry of this great artist has brought about a major conceptual shift in Cuban photography. Thus, Manuel Piña’s artistic practice clearly subverted the propaganda value of documentary photography and built a way to of doing that managed to question and denounce the frayed edges of a political system. Through analysis of their images, we can understand how the traditional dogmas of the photographic medium are changed drastically. There is no place for “truth” and “objectivity”. A critical metaphor will now become one of the best allies of Cuban cultural production in the late twentieth century.