Walker Evans: Cuba

by Walker Evans, Andrei Codrescu, Judith Keller

In 1933, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to take photographs for The Crime of Cuba, a book by American journalist Carleton Beals. Beals’s explicit goal was to expose the corruption of dictator Gerardo Machado and the torturous relationship between the United States and its island neighbor. Evans’s photographs are fascinating both for their subject matter and the evidence they provide of his artistic development. This volume brings together more than sixty of these images—all from the J. Paul Getty Museum’s extensive holdings of the photographer’s work.

 

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 the photographs are the work of a young artist whose temperament was distinctly at odds with Beals’s impassioned rhetoric and 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. Together, the images and the insightful essay provide a compelling study of a major artist at an important juncture in his career.

 

Genres: Photography

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 17, 2011

About the author

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".

Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.

In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A glimpse into the forgotten past of Cuba during the Great Depression.