Meg Griffiths : Casa de fruta y pan

Introduction :

From afar, I have always considered Cuba to be a culture of waiting. Waiting for what comes next, waiting for a better life, waiting for what is outside their reach. And yet, I also imagine that Cubans are living their lives as we all do —slicing tomatoes, welcoming babies, tending their gardens, sharing stories, continuing forward with less of some things and more of others. We as human beings often create mythology of how other cultures live—as we do with Cuba. Fortunately photographer Meg Griffiths steps through the threshold of what we think we know and shows us something remarkable: the opulence and intimacy of everyday life within family homes opened to tourists. She pulls up a chair at the table and lays out a feast of intense color, a display of fertile tradition, and delicious plating of domestic spaces in her richly considered project, Casa de fruta y pan.

Meg’s photographs help us begin to know a more intimate side to the Cuba we have imagined and assume we understand. What is so unique, they feel familiar, while distinctly expressing what is inherently powerful about Cuba. She photographs rooms that feel like places we have visited as children, with sticky fingers, grasping papaya and watermelon, consumed under the adoring gaze of a grandmother or auntie. She shows us interior tableaux of simple feasts—fruits and breads and morning coffee, sun-drenched kitchen counters strewn with the makings of an afternoon’s efforts, lace tablecloths and furniture that reflect cultural taste and the patina of time. She captures a world alive with saturated color—rooms of luscious pinks, deep sea turquoise, trumpet vine yellows and velvety reds, backdrops for patterns of flora and fauna, all exquisitely blended together with simple grace. Intertwined in this rich environment, Meg celebrates those that open their doors to her, creating formal, yet casual portraits inside lush gardens or familial spaces. These photographs exude contentment and confidence, a rootedness, expressing a feeling of being at once in the past and the present.

-Aline Smithson