After an opening to a warm reception last week, Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo's stunning photographs of Havana are on display at Brown University's Watson Institute for International Studies until January 30, 2015. Whether you're visiting the campus for the first time, passing through Providence, or already attending or teaching at the university, be sure to stop by and see these amazing photos, all of which appear in Pardo Lazo's Abandoned Havana, now out from Restless Books.
Presented by Art at Watson and Brown's Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the exhibition is entitled Habaniroshima, mon amour, in reference to the 1959 film Hiroshima, mon amour. Of the exhibition, International Writers Project Fellow Pardo Lazo writes,
In this photo exhibition before the F day, Fidel’s funeral, in this album of absence, as marvelous and bleak as Havana itself, from sly humor to abstract beauty, my lost lens pretends to guide you through the relics and fables of an exhausted Revolution in the waning days of Castro’s Cuba. These are the last pictures ever to be taken by my Canon camera. In the rest of world I am more than blind both to beauty and barbarisms. Stranger, please, pretend to guide me back to where I once belonged and now I long for nevermore.
At the opening, following a slideshow of photos by Pardo Lazo and Silvia Corbelle Batista set to Remo Giazotto's "Adagio in G Minor," Pardo Lazo participated in a Q&A with Brown professor of Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature Esther Whitfield.
