Mango Season by Jenia Fridlyand

Jenia Fridlyand spent her childhood in the Soviet Union, in the final stretch of years before perestroika changed everything. 

Decades later, a trip to Cuba would feel less like discovering somewhere new than like stumbling back into her own past. Under the blazing tropical light, she kept recognizing traces of that same gray, weighty communist texture she thought she'd left behind. Working with a large-format camera and a sensibility shaped by the American documentary tradition, she traveled across the island over several extended trips.

Her eye was drawn, almost by instinct, to moments where the familiar and the foreign seemed to overlap: two donkeys outlined against a ridge, a man waiting his turn at the barber's, a pair of rocking chairs glimpsed through a half-open door, sweat running down a worker's bent back, or sun-ripened fruit hanging heavy from a branch.