Susan S. Bank: Cuba: Campo Adentro

Susan S. Bank is based in Philadelphia PA and Portsmouth NH. She studied photography at the ‘perfect point’ in her life, when she was 60 years old, with Mary Ellen Mark and Graciela Iturbide in Oaxaca, Mexico and with Constantine Manos in Havana, Cuba in 2000. Known for developing long term proj... Read more

Susan S. Bank is based in Philadelphia PA and Portsmouth NH. She studied photography at the ‘perfect point’ in her life, when she was 60 years old, with Mary Ellen Mark and Graciela Iturbide in Oaxaca, Mexico and with Constantine Manos in Havana, Cuba in 2000. Known for developing long term projects, while on a weekend break from the Havana ’hustle’, Bank accidentally walked into a community of Cuban tobacco farmers in 2002 in Barrio Cuajani in the Valley Viñales, farmers who lived and worked without any modern conveniences and whom Bank believed had never been photographed before. Despite obstacles from the US Government and Cuban authorities, during multiple visits to the valley from 2002 and 2007, Susan was working and living with ten families related by either blood ties or marriage. Bank, working from the raw, simple details of daily life of the campesinos has created a poetic and surreal portrait of an agrarian culture. Ultimately her intention was to show universal themes of the human condition that reach beyond the island of Cuba.