Michael Dweck: Habana Libre

Habana Libre is a stunning contemporary exploration of the privileged class in a classless society: a secret life within Cuba. Michael Dweck's photographs are exhilarating, sensual and provocative, with a sexy and hypnotic visual rhythm. This is a face of Cuba never before photographed, never reported in Western media and never acknowledged openly within Cuba itself. It is a socially connected world of glamorous models and keenly observant artists, filmmakers, musicians and writers captured in an elaborate dance of survival and success. Here too are surprising interviews with sons of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara as well as many others who define the creative culture of Cuba and give it texture and substance. Habana Libre is not a media-fabricated Cuban postcard of crumbling mansions or old American cars, but a revealing and contemporary work by a visual artist adept at capturing the quiet gesture, the sensuous eye and the proud and provocative pose of that most romantic of contradictions: Cuba. Michael Dweck is a visual artist known for his suggestive photographic style. His first major photographic work published in volume form as The End: Montauk, N.Y., in 2004, blended documentary and staged photography to produce a compelling portrait of a beach community that exists as much in the realm of memory and pleasure as in the real world. In his follow-up to that success, in 2008, Dweck returned with his acclaimed project: Mermaids. The exhibition and accompanying volume explored the female nude refracted in still and roiling waters. Dweck's photographs were first showcased at Sotheby's, New York, in 2003, in their first solo exhibition for a living photographer. His work has become part of important international art collections and has been shown in major solo gallery exhibitions in New York, Paris, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Hamburg, Toronto and Brussels. Michael Dweck lives in New York City and Montauk.