Meg Griffiths
Meg Griffiths was born in Indiana and raised in Texas. She received two B.A.’s from the University of Texas in Cultural Anthropology and English Literature and earned her Master of Fine Arts in Photography from Savannah College of Art and Design. She currently lives in Lexington, Virginia where she is an Assistant Professor of Photography in the Art and Art History Department at Washington and Lee University.
Her work has been shown in multiple venues around country, including: Columbia Museum of Art, Center for Fine Art Photography, Museum of Living Artists in San Diego, Griffin Museum in Boston, Houston Center for Photography, Candela Gallery in Richmond, Virginia, and Rayko Gallery in San Francisco. She has also been published in Oxford American, Aint Bad Magazine, Boston Globe, Photo District News, South X Southeast Magazine, Lenscratch, Le Journal de la Photographie, and Fraction Magazine.
Her work is a part of many private collections as well as the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Center for Fine Art Photography, and Middle Tennessee University.
She was honored as one of PDN 30’s : New and Emerging Photographers, named one of eight Emerging Photographers at Blue Spiral Gallery, Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s Ones to Watch, and recently published Casa de fruta y pan with Aint Bad Editions in November 2015.
All Images © Meg Griffiths
The portfolio we will be featuring of Meg's is a selection of her work from Cuba. It is both beautiful and honest & tells a story of this most picturesque place and it's people; as it was, as it is and as it transitions into a new future.
CASA PARTICULAR
After the collapse of the communist bloc in 1989 and the subsequent evaporation of economic support from the Soviet Union, the people of Cuba had to develop creative, alternative sources of income to support their families. Many citizens opened their homes to tourists to supplement their state-regulated source of income. Thus, the casa particular, literally, “private house,” was born. The photographs in this series represent a modest cross-section of Cuban casas across the country and attend to a way of life where the previously private home becomes a business.
These images serve as visual translations of my experience of these households. They are a tribute to these individuals’ tenacity and willingness to improve the quality of their lives through the sharing of private, even sacred, spaces where their personal possessions are always on display. Simultaneously, the body of work acknowledges an undercurrent of formality; each family must play the role of eternal host.
Nevertheless, there is an inherent sense of familiarity as evidenced by small details such as a bowl of plastic fruit or the ingredients associated with the preparation of a home cooked meal. Domestic decorations represent keepsakes from generations past and new objects function as symbols of status. The images are an attempt to capture cross-cultural differences and similarities and to mark a shift from “pure” communism to a nascent, hybrid economy.