Cuba - Hardcover

Evans, Walker

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892366176 ISBN 13: 9780892366170

Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2001

Synopsis

In 1933, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to take photographs for The Crime of Cuba, a book by the American journalist Carleton Beals. Beals's explicit goal was to expose the corruption of Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado and the long, torturous relationship between the United States and its island neighbor. The photographs Evans made during his visit to Cuba are fascinating for both their subject matter and the evidence they provide of the young photographer's artistic development. Walker Evans: Cuba brings together more than sixty of these images-all from the Getty Museum's extensive holdings of the photographer's work-along with an essay by the noted writer and commentator Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu's spirited text helps to provide a sense of the aesthetic and political forces that were shaping Evans's art in the early 1930s. He argues that Evans's photographs are the work of a young artist whose temperament was distinctly at odds with Beals's impassioned rhetoric. Looking closely at individual photographs, Codrescu shows that Evans was just beginning to combine his early, formalist aesthetic with the social concerns that would figure so prominently in his later work. Evans's images and Codrescu's lively, insightful essay provide a compelling study of a major artist at an important juncture in his career.

About this title

About the Author:

Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, essayist, and professor of English at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Ay, Cuba! and the editor of Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters & Life. Judith Keller is associate curator of photographs at the Getty Museum and the author of Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection.

From Booklist:

Evans' 1933 Cuban photographs aren't as familiar as those in his famous collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1936). Made for a Marxist polemic against the Machado dictatorship, they show, Codrescu says in his appreciative essay, people looking less miserable and downtrodden than the text led readers to expect. Beggars, itinerants, hard laborers, and a peasant family come to Havana--nearly all look self-possessed and strong, if often exhausted. Many middle-class people also show up (you can tell by their shoes, Codrescu observes), and some young women and children are hard to read--they could be prostitutes and street urchins, respectively, or not. There are also sterling pictures of wall paintings, signs, and architectural features, with and without any people in them. Codrescu cogently argues that the Cuban pictures show Evans moving on from preoccupation with the formal beauty of buildings and things and discovering how to make pictures of people that are charged with narrative implications. Printed large in this album, they all look marvelous. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0892366176
• ISBN 13: 9780892366170
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96