Richard Sharum’s Campesino Cuba turns away from the urban and political imagery that often defines photographic accounts of Cuba. Beginning his research in late 2015, Sharum travelled across the country to photograph campesinos—farmers living in comparatively isolated areas—and the communities around them. His subject is not rural life as a picturesque category, but a social world shaped by agricultural work, geographic distance, and dependence on the land.

The photographs are in black and white, a choice that concentrates attention on people, terrain, and the physical conditions connecting them. Individual lives appear within a broader communal context: the countryside is understood through those who work it, while its inhabitants are shown in relation to the ground that sustains them. Sharum’s documentary approach gives weight to a population seldom prominent in photographic representations of Cuba, despite the place of campesino communities in the country’s history.

Made during a period described as one of national transition, the project also carries historical significance. Rather than attempting a comprehensive portrait of Cuba, it establishes a specific vantage point from which change may be considered. The farmers and their surroundings are not peripheral details in a national story; here, they constitute the story’s material and human structure.

Published by GOST Books in 2021, the 208-page volume offers collectors a sustained monochrome study of an underrepresented Cuban experience. Its importance rests neither on novelty nor on claims of rarity, but on the clarity of its subject and the duration of Sharum’s engagement. Campesino Cuba belongs in collections concerned with documentary photography, rural cultures, and the ways photobooks can complicate familiar images of a nation by shifting attention toward communities more often left outside the frame.