On the sidewalks of Havana, I hung a white bed sheet over the pavement and invited passersby to step in front of it. The sheet becomes a stage, and each sitter decides how to appear on it. Echoing the cloth backdrops of the African studio portrait, the series carries the studio out into the street, but refuses to hide the street: the sandbags, the tripods and the onlookers stay in the frame. Each image holds both the performance and its backstage. Together, sitter and photographer agree to imagine a studio, yet the sheet never stops being what it is: just a bed sheet. In post-production I washed out the palette, erasing the markers of the present and lending the prints the quality of a hand-painted photograph.