This visual archive was created as a part of the research project CUBAFLUX, funded by the Kone Foundation and conducted by the John Morton Center for North American Studies. The images were taken by scholars with no prior experience or training in photography, and they were initially shot to be used only as research materials. During the course of the research it occurred to us that perhaps the archive of our images could be used for educational purposes.

The images were shot between 2015 and 2020 with the theme of Cuba in Flux in mind, but most of them were spontaneous shots, rather than following any preset agenda. Based on mobile ethnography as a method, we let the city be our guide. In the words of an elderly man we encountered while walking in the city,  En la Habana caminando se conoce la verdadera realidad, walking is the best way to know the city.

Throughout our research, we were acutely aware of the complexity of power relations both in visual representations as well as in practices of looking.  Although the emphasis of the galleries is on material culture, rather than people, embedded in them are a range of social, economic, and political power relations that penetrate physical objects and structures. For ethical reasons, faces have been blurred in images that display people.

We hope the archive will be used as a tool for learning, whose purpose is not to offer any singular interpretations of the images, but—rather—to showcase the complexity of fieldwork research and visuality as a tool for scholarship.  In particular, we envisioned that the archive might serve the purposes of coursework with a visual studies component as well as broader methodological and theoretical discussions beyond any disciplinary boundaries.