Inconsolable Memories by Stan Douglas. Illustrated, 151 pages, hardcover. University of British Columbia Press, 2005.
Ever since the mid-1980s when Stan Douglas began producing the film installations that set him on his present trajectory, his work has been recognized for its poetic exploration of the uncanny and its serious engagement with ideas. The photographs in this book make up a body of work that far exceeds what is now a genre - European and American photographs of the ruined splendour of Havana and its fleet of operating pre-1959 American cars. While researching and producing the experimental film, Inconsolable Memories, Stan Douglas produced numerous photographic images, which are captured in this book. The photographs are immediately beautiful, elegant and dazzling as composition and pushed to the limit of photographic verisimilitude and precision. Yet, they too, narrate a history of development, of colonialism, and of the great ambiguity that is the future of Cuba.
