Photography: Trip to Cuba
January 5th - 12th, 2016On January 5, nine students, three faculty and one alumnae flew to Havana, Cuba. The idea was to give the students the experience of doing Documentary Street Photography in what was for most of them, their first foreign environment. They were confronted with the reality of logistics and communication issues in an environment where most of them did not speak the local language. Havana is an excellent environment to be exposed for the first time, to this genre of photography. It is dynamic, rich, colourful, historic and safe. Whatever one’s opinion may be concerning Cuban politics, the reality is that there is very little street crime in a communist controlled environment. One of our major concerns were the changes that are happening in Cuba, even as I write this. In fact, Havana is so popular with American visitors at the moment, that we had difficulty arranging for accommodations. Another interesting new reality was the proliferation of smart phones and wireless devices. In Havana, there are occasionally zones of Wi-Fi spillover outside of certain hotels or government offices. In the evenings there would be large groups of Cuban adolescents huddled on staircases or leaning against walls in areas where they could access free Wi-Fi, perusing FaceBook and YouTube. Communism seems helpless confronted with FaceBook.