ICP Photos of Cuba, Then and Now at Southampton Arts Center

A rare trove of photographs and posters depicting the history of Cuba along with contemporary images will be on display this summer at the Southampton Arts Center thanks to a collaboration with the International Center of Photography in New York City.

The show will open on Aug. 15 with a reception from 5 to 8 p.m. featuring Cuban-inspired food, cocktails, and music, and will be on view until Sept. 7.

Iliana Cepero, a Cuban art historian, critic, and curator who left Cuba in 2006 and teaches at New York University, the New School, and other Manhattan institutions, is a co-curator of the show along with Pauline Vermare, a curator at I.C.P.

It will be “the first survey show of Cuban photography,” Ms. Cepero said recently by phone.

“The American public has never seen 65 years of Cuban photography,” she said — pictures that document a “very complex history” that begins during Havana’s heyday as a glitzy destination for Hollywood stars and American mobsters and continues through the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro, the first days of his Communist regime, and on to today.

The collaboration was fostered by Renee Harbers Liddell, a part-time Southampton resident and I.C.P. board member, who conceived of an I.C.P. photography show out east as part of a tradition of big-city arts institutions “going out to the country for the summer,” she said last week.

With Cuba in the news, as President Barack Obama restored diplomatic ties between the two countries that fell out more than 50 years ago over political differences, Mark Lubell, the photography center’s executive director, suggested a Cuba theme.

Ms. Liddell said that she and her husband, Christopher Liddell, lent their support to the show in the hopes that it would spark discussions among viewers about “issues and topics related to Cuba.”

Ms. Cepero said the show will include “an impressive collection of Cuban posters,” from political propaganda posters to old movie posters.

“The graphic history of the ’60s and ’70s in Cuba is very, very interesting,” she said — influenced by the Pop Art, Op Art, and avant-garde movements as well as by an Eastern European, particularly Polish, aesthetic, which grew from the involvement of the Soviet Union in Cuba.

Ms. Cepero said they found “a treasure trove” at the Center for Cuban Studies, a New York City nonprofit that includes the Cuban Art Space, which exhibits Cuban artists and seeks to educate the American public about Cuban cultural life.

While, given the timeframe for creating the show, it was not possible to visit Cuba to select work by contemporary photographers there, a number of works were selected from the extensive collection amassed by Ricardo Viera, a professor and curator at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.

Pictures from the 1950s came from Vicki Gold Levi, a co-author of the book “Cuba Style: Graphics from the Golden Age of Design,” whose collection chronicles the pre-revolution days when Cuba, with its hotels and casinos, was a resort destination for numerous Americans.

The exhibit will begin with these “images of the glamour of Havana in the ’50s,” Ms. Cepero said. “We felt it was important for the public to know how disruptive the revolution was to the fabric of Cuban life.”

When Fidel Castro and his guerilla army marched, victorious, into Havana in 1959, having overthrown Cuba’s president, Fulgencio Batista, Raul Corrales, a Cuban photographer, and the late Burt Glinn, who lived in East Hampton, were there taking pictures.

Pictures by Mr. Glinn and by Corrales and other “classical photographers from the ’60s,” Ms. Cepero said — several of whom were given access to Castro and his cronies as officially sanctioned chroniclers of the revolution — are among those in the exhibit.

While Mr. Glinn also documented the first days of the victorious revolution and Castro’s takeover, his work, Ms. Cepero said, is very different from the pictures taken by Castro’s official photographers, as it “chronicled the chaos that ensued” after Fidel and his cohorts marched into Havana — including riots and clashes between pro-revolution forces and those supporting Batista.

The show will include color portraits of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara by Elliot Erwitt, also a former East Hampton resident and a well-known photographer long associated with Magnum Photos, the worldwide agency founded by Robert Capa.

Pictures from the early days of the Castro regime include one of Fidel drinking Coca-Cola and another of Camilo Cienfuegos, another Cuban revolutionary, clad in a baseball uniform, during a game.

Ms. Ceperos, who specialized in the history of photography as a professor at the University of Havana and was a curator at the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba and at Fototeca de Cuba, a Cuban national photographic institute, said that in Cuba photography “has been an art form that the government has monitored, controlled, and been very concerned about. . . .”

In the 1960s, she said, many Cuban photographers were pro-revolution, and “happy participants” of the Castro takeover. “So there was no problem to document this euphoric trip, this new hope for the country.”

Castro, she said, was “very savvy,” and used photographers like Corrales to create particular public, iconic images. In the ’70s, photographers were sent to document Cuban labor, to record the country’s economy through pictures of workers in factories and in fields.

Cuban photographers, the curator said, were “always struggling for self-determination; to create some legitimate space for freedom, and expression.”

There has always been a tension in Cuban photography as a medium, she said, with photographers enlisted to reflect “all these political and social changes, in a very sophisticated and critical way,” while the artists continued to seek acceptable ways of self-expression. Obtaining the equipment needed for photography — cameras, film, and the like — has been problematic, with supplies often controlled by government agencies, she said.

But in the 1990s, photography in Cuba began to address “themes that were taboo,” such as migration, racism, Afro-Cuba religion, and “queer culture,” she said.

Even today, Ms. Cepero said, “there is freedom, but everyone knows the limits.” Cuban photographers and other artists walk, and sometimes push, the line between acceptable free expression and art that might garner negative attention from the authorities.

Recent political changes could bring more opportunity for Cuban photographers, in access to materials, technology, and the Internet, she said.

The show also includes works by Alex Webb, an American who visited Cuba in 2000, Christopher Brown, who created a photo series this year called “Paradiso,” after a 1968 novel of that name by Jose Lezana Lima, a Cuban poet, and by Tony Mendoza, a Cuban-American who, after emigrating to the U.S. as a child, returned to Cuba to make a series of photographs in black and white.

“We wanted all these different gazes,” Ms. Cepero said. “I hope the public leaves the show asking questions,” she said, rather than feeling they have pinned down an understanding of Cuba. Instead, she hopes that viewers will “realize that Cuba is a very, very complex place.”