An up-close look at life in cultures afar

The result is that these images, full of incident and personality, can only be experienced visually. This does the photographers, the images, and even the people in them a disservice. The documentary impulse is only one strand in photography. But even in this age of image glut and visual overload it remains a worthy, noble, and necessary element in the medium. Certainly, there are formalist photographers for whom titles and captions are superfluous, or even detrimental, to their purposes. That is not the case here. There’s no way, for example, that Susan Bank wants us to experience rural Cuba as a vehicle for purely aesthetic concerns.

Cuba is one of those subjects that can make alarm bells go off for a viewer. Will the approach be ideological? Or perhaps overly romantic and sentimental? Bank avoids such temptations in her pictures of the agricultural community Campo Adentro. She neither defends nor attacks the revolution and offers up no “Campo Adentro Social Club.’’

“I had no political agenda,’’ she writes. “I had no intent to disturb life in el campo. I did, however, have to guard against drifting into a romantic vision of a way of life that on the surface appeared to be exotic and perfectly harmonious.’’

The key phrase in the previous sentence is “on the surface.’’ Harmony isn’t necessarily congruent with subsistence. Bank’s 22 images present a hard-worn life of rural work. Hands are gnarled, expressions downcast. A little girl stares into a cistern - not exactly a wishing well. A man carries a dead pig. Bank presents her subjects modestly, with seeming artlessness - until you notice how often she finds a window or door to use as a framing device.