Overview

"""Habana Libre"": Here 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. Havana is seen as the cultural center of the island, a mass of contrary images, raw and tender, barren and alive, musical and lyrical and fearful...sometimes all in an evening. Here too are surprising interviews with sons of Castro and 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 an artist adept at capturing the quiet gesture, the sensuous eye and the proud and provocative pose of that most romantic of contradictions: Cuba."

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Michael Dweck's Habana Libre is a sun-baked Who's Who of Cuba's cultural elite.--Stephen Heyman T- The New York Times Magazine (09/20/2011)

Michael Dweck's Habana Libre is a sun-baked Who's Who of Cuba's cultural elite.--Stephen Heyman T: The New York Times Style Magazine Cuba--once referred to as that unhappy island by President John F. Kennedy--is often portrayed in a negative, faded frame, with destitute streets and abandoned American automobiles. From March 2009 to July 2010, photographer Michael Dweck aimed to capture the secret side of Castro's Communist capital, with all of its combustible energy, from the often overlooked yet alluring perspective of its artistic elite... Despite the nation's political strife and poor economic standing, Dweck's contemporary collection-made possible by his inside access to the country's ascending generation... is surprisingly rich.--Lenora Jane Estes Vanity Fair Dweck focuses on Havana's clandestine and seemingly carefree creative class of artists, writers and models. Suprising to many, Westbrook asserts, there is happiness in Cuba. Dweck shows us that the sensuous, slinky side of pre-Castro Cuba never really dissapeared; it just went underground.--Jack Crager American Photo Dweck's new book, Habana Libre, reveals a secretive collective of friends based in the country's capital, making work that treads a fine line between conceptual and subversive.--Editor Nowness The photographs reveal a Cuba typically seen only by insiders--Ann Binlot Artinfo While the more intriguing pictures in a book shot in Mr. Dweck's unchallenging soft-focus black-and-white style ( I didn't want to do documentary, he said. National Geographic can do that ) are those depicting the sons of revolutionaries disporting themselves with models and smoking fat cigars, gotcha shots are not the sole surprise. Ultimately, the book is a narrative of this privileged class, Mr. Dweck said. In its pretty, almost hapless way, the book depicts a curious warp in a great historical arc. Can it be that the end point of a violent revolution fomented to create a classless society is a crop of tropical Zoolanders and privileged It girls? The question, though not on the agenda of Habana Libre, threads through it all the same.--Guy Trebay The New York Times

Author Information

Michael Dweck is a visual artist known for his suggestive photographic style. His first major photographic work was published in volume form as The End: Montauk, N.Y., in 2004, and was featured in several exhibitions and art fairs that year. In his follow-up to that success, in 2008, Dweck returned with his new project: Mermaids. The exhibition and accompanying volume featured a dazzling array of photographs of the female nude submerged in water. His photographs were first showcased at Sotheby's, New York, in 2003, in their first solo exhibition for a living photographer. Since then, his work has become part of important international art collections and has been shown in major solo gallery exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Hamburg, Brussels and Knokke. Michael Dweck lives in New York City and Montauk.

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