The inventive choices of the long-embargoed Cubans, holding out against their neighbor to the north, are never so brilliantly documented as in a lot where photographer David Alan Harvey found men playing a game of baseball without a bat. If we are trapped in the modern avalanche of moving images, then still photographers are our liberators. If we are caught in the endless movie of the security camera, then still photographers are our ultimate editors. They snatch the eternal from the ephemeral. Landscape, gesture and portrait are pulled from the maw, reclaiming what we might have forgotten or have never known.
Every photograph is both a narrative of one person's choices and of all people's experiences.
Being photographed, taking a picture and viewing a picture intersect at the soul and constitute one of the first discourses of the modern world. Photographs are the indelible records of humanity's impulses to make, alter and escape history. Here we find humans doing all three. Most of all, we find photographers offering us their judgments and risks, their artistry and their luck, as a window into the truly private, the truly human. Photographers are dedicated to the notion that the world is full of moments of heroism and humanity.