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Every photographer who lands in Havana is aware of the usual taking pictures guidelines. A 1957 Chevy Bel Air towards peeling pastel paint. A cigar-smoking abuela on a wrought-iron balcony. The Malecón promenade at golden hour. And the factor is, you are most likely going to get a pleasant image. It’ll be, although, an image that is been taken roughly 9 million occasions already.
David Saxe went searching for one thing else: the unposed, unpolished moments most guests stroll straight previous. His ensuing sequence Cuba es Vida, constructed from three separate journeys to the island, has simply been named All About Photo’s solo exhibition for August 2026 .
It’s a monochtome undertaking that leans onerous into darkness, blur and ambiance, favouring feeling over documentation. Rather than vacationer landmarks, he went searching for domino video games below a portico, a trumpeter perfecting his traces on a seawall at nightfall, two sisters doing one another’s hair on a crumbling patio. What makes it worthy of consideration, although, is not only the subject material. It’s the stubbornness of the visible language.
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Grain as a function
Plenty of journey photographers deal with imperfection as one thing to be corrected in submit: sharpen the grain away, elevate the shadows, clear up the blur. Saxe does the other. His photographs resist the polished perfection that is grow to be the default setting for journey images. The press launch places it plainly: shadows soften the sides of reminiscence, motion suggests the heartbeat of day by day life, and imperfect moments grow to be expressions of authenticity fairly than errors to repair.
That’s worth thinking about, next time you’re tempted to bin a slightly soft frame because it didn’t look “clean” enough. Here, a boy mid-tumble in a Havana street, caught in a blur that a sharpness-obsessed editor might reject, does more to convey the energy of the moment than a tack-sharp version ever could.
Why this matters
Cuba has been photographed relentlessly over the years, and there’s a real risk of the island becoming photographic shorthand: a set of visual clichés rather than a place with its own present tense.
Saxe’s approach – three trips deep and built around access rather than spectacle – gets past that. He’s not interested in the big symbols of history and culture for their own sake. He wants to capture what those symbols sit alongside, which is ordinary Cuban life carrying on regardless.
A long apprenticeship
Saxe, born in Montreal in 1943, cites Robert Frank, Roy DeCarava and Henri Cartier-Bresson as his early influences, and spent four years studying under the Canadian photographer John Max before building a career that’s now taken him through decades of exhibitions across Canada and the US.
It’s a reminder that this kind of loose, atmospheric documentary style isn’t a shortcut or an aesthetic trend; it’s the product of a long apprenticeship in looking properly.
For anyone planning a documentary project where the obvious shot is tempting, Cuba es Vida is worth studying closely. The lesson isn’t complicated: put the postcard down, wait for the gesture, and let the grain do some of the talking.
Cuba es Vida runs throughout August on All About Photo’s Solo Exhibition platform.
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