Havana Cross, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In downtown Havana, Cuba, near the Capitolio Nacional and across the street from the Floridita—a bar favored by Hemingway in Cuba—I wandered into a dark passageway. Once, before the revolution, this gallery had probably been an upscale shopping arcade below an apartment complex. With dark, yawning and broken windows and peeling stucco, this prosperous past was hard to imagine.

There were four entrances to the complex, each passing though a tunnel to reach the center of the building, which occupied a city block. As I approached the center, looking up, the pattern of the sky against the building seemed to formed a cross—showing that in photographic composition negative space can be as important as the surrounding positive space.

I lay supine on my back on the ground, and shot straight up.