Michael Dweck

"Cuba lies like a sleeping crocodile in the warm sea. More importan than dangerous. Less asleep than you imagine.
A country both individualistic and tightly controlled. Stubbornly inconvenient, but resilient. An impregnable self-concept, yet humble."
Michael Dweck, Habana Libre.

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Michael Dweck: Habana Libre Interviews by William Westbrook. 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
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DAMIANI
ISBN: 9788862081849
$65.00 | In stock

FROM THE BLOG

Michael Dweck Book Signing at BASE, Miami

On Tuesday, November 29th from 7:30-10:30pm, the Miami select shop BASE will host photographer Michael Dweck, signing copies of his new book, Habana Libre.
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Michael Dweck

"Cubans are happy in their own skin. No Cuban is self-conscious."
-Tony Brocklehurst, quoted in Habana Libre



Featured image, reproduced from Habana Libre, is Ibis González at the Nacional Hotel. As recently as a few years ago Cubans were not allowed in the hotel except as workers. Habana, 2010.

Michael Dweck: Habana Libre

Interviews by William Westbrook.
Published by Damiani

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.
The photographs of Michael Dweck (born 1957) were first exhibited at Sotheby's, New York, in 2003, in the auction house's first solo exhibition for a living photographer. Dweck's first major photographic work, The End: Montauk, N.Y., published 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 desire as in the real world. His acclaimed 2008 volume Mermaids explored the female nude refracted in water. Dweck's work has become part of important international art collections and has been shown in major solo gallery exhibitions around the world.