Peabody Essex show captures Havana's wistful fragility
By Christine Temin, Globe Staff | June 2, 2004

SALEM - The buildings that line Havana's boulevards are an inventory of architectural styles, from Spanish colonial to Art Deco, that look to be made of crystallized sugar about to crumble. Breathtaking, they also make you hold your breath: There's a suspense about their frail facades.

The photographer Robert Polidori has captured this fragility. Polidori first went to Havana in 1997 on assignment for The New Yorker. He returned four more times to take pictures of the buildings, both exteriors and interiors, and some of the people who live in them. The result is two-fold: a stunning new show at the Peabody Essex Museum, and a sumptuous book that is both more and less than a catalog. There are many more images in it than in the PEM exhibition, but the only text is a one-page essay by Eduardo Luis Rodriguez, who has written extensively about Cuba.

Rodriguez's flowery phrases are offset by a more analytical discussion of Polidori's pictures in the brochure accompanying the show. It's written by Elizabeth S. Padjen, PEM's consulting curator of architecture and design, who organized this show. Padjen presents a concise history of the universal fascination with ruins; the history of Havana's architectural styles and the politics that influenced them; and a few snippets about Polidori himself. She notes that he prefers to be called a ``habitat photographer'' rather than the more usual ``architectural photographer,'' because, she writes, ``he sees buildings and cities as containers of human activity.'' The other ``containers'' he's photographed range from Chernobyl to Versailles.

He's part of an entire ``container'' movement of photographers lured by interiors, mostly unpopulated yet giving a sense of their inhabitants nonetheless. Contemporary examples include Hiroshi Sugimoto, who photographs empty historic theaters; James Casebere, who constructs and then photographs eerie, celestial white fantasy spaces; and Shellburne Thurber, a Bostonian whose imagery runs from psychiatrists' offices to decaying buildings in the Old South.

Thurber is closest to Polidori's aesthetic: They're both intrigued by the wistful poetry of disintegration. The cover image on the Polidori book is the ``Señora Luisa Faxas Residence No. 318 (at the corner of Avenida 5ta.), Miramar.'' (His practice is to name photographs after the addresses they capture.) The señora remained in the house until her death in 2000; Polidori photographed her drawing room in 1997. The once-palatial residence has marble floors, a crystal chandelier, columns, and grand doorways. It also has heaps of warped books piled on a gray metal desk, stained upholstery, oil paintings in tatters, and a plaster ceiling that has partly fallen to the floor, revealing the lathing underneath. There are views into other rooms, lined with bookcases and paintings - and a bicycle that must have been a family member's means of transport.

The Señora Faxas house, so obviously inspired by centuries-old European palazzi, was built in 1926, long after the style had become passe in Europe itself. Other Havana buildings were more of their time: Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Streamline Moderne turned up prior to 1950. The city is architectural chaos, and Polidoro captures it brilliantly. There is no such thing as a ``pure'' period building here; everything is a hybrid reflecting generations of inhabitants. The collapsing structures are sad; the huge modern office towers, apartment buildings, and hotels built since the revolution are scary in their impersonal ugliness. These are ``containers'' in an insidious sense, places for storing humans.

Most gothic of all Polidori's images is the ``Ciudadela'' series of a tenement built within an erstwhile mansion, its spaces divided into a claustrophobic labyrinth. At the end of one gimcrack corridor, which Polidori presents head-on, is a vivid turquoise door topped with scrolls and an urn. It's a door no one can enter any longer. The options that remain are narrow, filthy paths defined by walls cobbled together from any material at hand.

Polidori, a former filmmaker, is a master of cinematic stagings. He captures from above and at a distance views of bleak modernist buildings and the arched red rooftops of the National School of Modern Dance, a complex that is now shabby but once symbolized the idealistic stance of the revolution toward the arts. He creates spaces both grand and confining - each in the same shot, in the case of ``Edificio Focsa, 17 No. 55 (between M and N), Vedado,'' where the monstrous curve of a modern building embraces - and appears ready to strangle - a lovely little pink-and-white villa in its shadow. He has a fine gift for composition: One shot of a triangular building flanked by avenues that eventually merge is reminiscent of Caillebotte's Paris cityscapes.

He can create deep space, or flatten the facades of ornate buildings until they look as if they're made of paper. He balances the romance of haunted period interiors with the reality of concrete monstrosities never finished. The sweeping Deco balconies in his images are as fluid as ribbons - and they're in the pink that was one of the pastel hues mandated by colonial building codes (because they reflect heat). Polidori records them as they zoom around corners, in a rush to nowhere.

The ``Edificio Seguro Medico'' might cause dejÁa vu among Boston-area residents. The 1956 building designed by Cuban architect Antonio Quintana is a reworking of the 1953 landmark Lever House in New York, and foreshadows Harvard's 1963 Peabody Terrace, student housing by Josep Lluis Sert, who was both the architect of Havana's 1958 master plan and the head of Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Polidori is not the only photographer to succumb to Cuba's visual allure. The recent book ``Cuba on the Verge: An Island in Transition'' pairs the work of prominent writers and photographers from both Cuba and the United States. Among the photographers are famous names including Inge Morath, Carrie Mae Weems, and the Boston-based Abelardo Morell, whose approach to seeing the native land he left as a teenager is a contrast to that of Polidori, who first arrived as an adult foreigner. Morell's black-and-white camera obscura images depict a Havana upside-down, projected onto the walls of enigmatic, drab, oddly furnished rooms whose purpose is uncertain. Polidori's seductive images offer another reality, one that is less personal and idiosyncratic, one that occasionally is almost too beautiful.

Polidori's Havana is a time warp defined in large part by Cuban-American relations. Its setting at PEM is ironic, also a meeting of Cuba and the United States. The photographs line the four walls of a balcony that overlooks a gallery of Americana. Its objects include a wooden sign for the ``Washington Hotel,'' painted with a folk art likeness of our first president, and a gilded weathervane in the form of the bald eagle that represents American might and provokes patriotism - sometimes, perhaps, the kind of patriotism that still keeps Cuba and the United States apart.

Christine Temin's Perspectives column runs on Wednesdays.

Havana: Photographs by Robert Polidori
At: the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, through Jan. 9.

Link: Robert Polidori

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