The Cuban woman has been one of Swiss photographer Luc Chessex’s primary focus of intere since se ling in La Havana in 1961. Chessex’s ambitious purpose is to prove that photography is also good at lying; it is not a hi orical truth, but indeed a fragment of the photographer’s subje ive gaze. This series is a critical atement about the many clichés concerning Cuban women. Chessex mixes every faces, every representation, from the sugar cane eld worker to the revolutionary militant, from the woman in the reet fascinated by fashion di lays in shop windows to cabaret dancers. And in order to ress the ambiguity of form, he produced very conventional portraits that he then hand-colored in order to show through a classical ae hetic that it is possible to make the photograph lie, that it is even o en the ultimate purpose.
