Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City: Real and Imagined Havana, by James Clifford Kent

摘要

Aesthetics and the Revolutionary City possesses elements to be revered. Its keenhistorical passage through visual renderings of Havana, primarily carried outby outsiders, is diligently researched and well narrated. Tracing the entrance offoreign photography into Cuba in the mid-nineteenth century and the emergence of Cuban photography during the War of Independence and in theCuban republic, James Clifford Kent then pauses to bring to life Walker Evans’s1933 trip to the island. With a commanding interdisciplinary lens, he interrogates Evans’s practice of what Guy Debord called psychogeography—the debanalization of urban space, within his representations of Cuba that wereinitially taken for Carlton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba (1933). Kent acutely outlines how Evans, as a “flaneur armed with a camera” (p. 19), becomes observerand observed. His description of Evans’s work is enriched through referencesto Cuban writers such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Alejo Carpentier, andLeonardo Padura, which help elucidate an intricate choreography betweeninsider and outsider. Kent’s technical savvy, matched by a respect for the photographers and filmmakers he analyzes, reflects his first-hand experience withphotography and film.