Robert Levine’s work reproduces and places in context thirty-six albumen photographs taken by Charles DeForest Fredricks and his employees in Cuba during the 1850s. The subjects of the photographs vary greatly—from stately royal palms to busy harbor scenes. People figure less prominently in the photographs: upper-class Cubans pose on balconies and porches, while “members of the lower social classes were rendered largely ‘invisible’” by the camera (p. 21). Some exceptions include a black man posing in leg stocks, urban residents peeping out of doorways, and black women harvesting sugarcane.
Rather than focus on the technical or esthetic features of the photographs, Levine chooses to discuss the pictures as historical sources. He emphasizes that because they were commercial photographs, commissioned by Spaniards and creoles eager to present an image of an orderly Cuba entering an era of progress, they rarely reveal much of the social tensions that lay beneath the calm exterior. Levine’s text captures well the contradiction between the historical reality of social transformation and the “idealized conception of social order” presented in the photographs. He concludes that “the Cuba captured by the lens of Charles Fredricks appears as a doll’s house, a posed world without real people, a theatrical stage without human dimensions” (p. 68). Levine’s discussion of what the pictures fail to capture, and of why they fail to capture those things, is provocative.
His discussion of what the pictures do reveal about Cuba in the 1850s is also noteworthy, for Levine can find historical significance in pictures that at first glance would seem to reveal little. Together, Levine’s text and Fredricks’s pictures provide original insight into the ways in which Cuba was portrayed and seen by Cubans and foreigners in the period before the upheavals over slavery and Cuban nationality during 1868-98.
