On her seventh birthday, studio art lecturer Virginia Beahan opened a present from her father. It was her first camera.
"He gave me a Kodak Brownie camera, and it was a love affair from the beginning," she recalls.
Beahan has since switched her Kodak for an 8-by-10 Deardoff View camera, and she now travels the world taking landscape photographs of what she finds.
Her most recent project focuses on a compilation of pictures for her new book, "Cuba Singing with Bright Tears."
Several of these photographs are on display at the Strauss Gallery in the Hopkins Center for the Arts, and Beahan will hold a book signing at the beginning of next month.
Beahan explained that she became fascinated with Cuban culture on a 1986 visit to Miami to see her father's home in a neighborhood that was quickly developing a reputation as "Little Havana."
"I met all the Cuban neighbors and really liked Cuban culture, and I always wanted to visit Cuba," she said. "I also became very aware of the political situation there."
Many of these neighbors were Cuban exiles who fled their homeland when Fidel Castro came to power after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. They had lost their homes and fortunes, yet seemed optimistic about their futures.
On Beahan's first visit to Cuba in 2001, she found that the people there shared a sense of hope with their countrymen in "Little Havana."
Their view of the revolution, however, was much different.
Beahan visited an area of rural Cuba whose people had greatly benefited from the new government.
"I realized as I traveled around Cuba that it was a wonderfully interesting and rich culture, and that literally the stories about history and culture were written on the land," she said.
She met a woman living near the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo, who had painted a Jose Marti quotation on her home that translates as "To be educated in order to be free."
A local baker who was named after a revolutionary martyr decorated the side of his bakery with portraits of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos.Beahan took photographs of both buildings, and prints are included in the Strauss Gallery.
"You can't talk about nature and culture without it being political in a way, but I was also interested in the landscape itself." she said. "What does Cuba look like?"
She took photographs of sugarcane growing on mountains, coffee fields just before harvest and the water that separates Cuba from the United States by only 90 miles.
One photograph, "Dock for Fishing Boats, Caibarien" (2006), depicts a dock in disrepair, where boats are still tied to the toothpick planks daily.
As Beahan explained, "This dock could be in a way a kind of metaphor of all of Cuba -- the virility of this fishing dock.
For Beahan, the picture is symbolic of the delicate balance Cuba maintains between the politics of Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and the politics of the U.S.
When she discovered Cuba's broad cultural and political history, Beahan said, "I knew this was going to be a big project."
With plans for the book, she returned to Cuba seven more times, focusing on the rural areas that had not been extensively covered by other photographers.
Her 8-by-10 view camera captures impeccable detail in her photos, which range in focus from landscape scenes to snapshots of the everyday lives of Cuban people.
Through her poignant photographs, the book encourages viewers to explore a different view of a country whose people remain hopeful despite a tumultuous past.
"I hope to invite the viewer to see things in the world that they could become curious about through my pictures, and I'm interested in the way a person could be interested in the photograph and the way that the photograph brings together ideas and feelings," Beahan said.
Her photographs are on display through Dec. 7th in the Strauss Gallery, open Tuesday through Saturday from 12:30 p.m. to 10:00 p.m and Sunday from 12:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
An artist's reception and book signing will take place on Dec. 2nd in the gallery, from 4:30 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.
