"In its subject and deliberate craftsmanship, Titarenko’s work pays homage to Walker Evans’s influential 1930s portrayal of Havana, which surveyed the city’s poverty and riches under the then-dictator Gerardo Machado. But stylistically Titarenko’s visual signature makes nods to the island’s contemporary circumstance. His Havana appears caught in a dream. Simultaneously of the present while trapped in stasis, it is by turns an appealing and uncomfortable place, one filled with light but dominated by gray, populated by beautiful and shadowy traces of reality and built of unsettled hopes. It murmurs something both vivid and unresolved, waiting to awake."
Brett Abbott, Curator of Photography, High Museum of Art
From the essay "Waiting to Awake," as published in The City is a Novel (Damiani, 2015)