Reading and Discussion /
“Walking to Guantánamo” with Virginia Beahan and Richard Fleming

Date: Friday, 8 May 2009, 7–9 pm
Location: Cabinet, 300 Nevins Street, Brooklyn (map and directions here)
FREE. No RSVP necessary

Photographer Virginia Beahan and author Richard Fleming will present their recent works on Cuba. Beahan, a lecturer in the visual arts at Dartmouth College, will present images from &Cuba: Singing with Bright Tears, a book of 8x10 View Camera images made over the course of eight separate fortnights spent traveling the island since 2001. Fleming, in what is likely an irrelevant coincidence, also spent almost exactly four months in Cuba, when he set out to walk the length of Cuba in the year 2000, all in one stretch. He will read selections from his recent book Walking to Guantánamo, choosing passages evoked by his own reaction to Beahan’s images. (Walking to Guantánamo, he warns, is not a book about the use of the Guantánamo Bay navy base as a camp for the detention of alleged terrorists, but rather a chronicle of abandoned aspirations, both personal and political). The duo will then pepper one another with pointed questions, and answer any interjected by the audience.