Jenia Fridlyand: Mango Season

Fridlyand’s Soviet upbringing thaws in her candid images of 21st-century Cuba Published with The Agency, Hudson Valley. Photographer Jenia Fridlyand (born 1975) grew up in the Soviet Union in the years just prior to perestroika. Visiting Cuba in the second decade of the 21st century, then, felt like an uncanny homecoming. While both tangible and familiar, the grim fabric of the communist quotidian kept unraveling for Fridlyand under the bright, tropical sun. With a large format camera and a photographic practice rooted in the American tradition, Fridlyand traveled around the island during several extended trips. She intuitively trained her lens on moments and scenes with the potential of holding both the known and the novel―from a pair of donkeys silhouetted against hilltops, a customer at a barber shop and a pair of rocking chairs seen through an open door, to drops of sweat on a man’s curved back and sweet fruit hanging ripe on a tree.