The Cuba Archive, a 168-page hardcover coffee-table book featuring 125 color photographs by photographer, Tria Giovan, is one that will have you transfixed as you turn each of its pages. Published by Damiani in 2017, it documents some of the images that Giovan's camera captured during her multiple visits to the Caribbean island from 1990 through 1996. These difficult years - thanks to the "hamster wheel of ever-changing policies from the US and from Cuba" - had been dubbed by Cuba's dictator, Fidel Castro, as The Special Period and prove the Cuban people's resiliency, perseverance and fighting spirit.

A comprehensive look at Giovan's photos are on display through the Cuba IS exhibition which is being held at the Annenberg Center for Photography in Los Angeles from September 9th, 2017 - March 4th, 2018 with Giovan providing a special lecture there on November 16th, 2017.

Giovan grew up in the Virgin Islands and first visited Cuba looking for "a place to photograph that had escaped homogenization and commercialization." That she found, and went about documenting everything she could point her lens at - from interiors to streets, and countryside's to cities, a "unique beauty but one intertwined with deterioration, isolation and loss," as award winning journalist and author, Silvana Patternostro, so eloquently describes it in the book's foreword. But most importantly, within the twenty five thousand images Giovan took, she captured some of the eleven million people who lived there during that period; the country's citizens who were holding strong in the face of what seemed like a "teetering precipice."