Walker Evans in Cuba: The Ernest Hemingway Collection
|
© Walker Evans
|
In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the acclaimed 33-year-old writer Ernest Hemingway rented a thirty-foot boat from a friend and embarked on a fishing expedition from Key West, Florida, to Havana, Cuba. He would spend several months in Havana, an experience he would turn into his fifth novel, To Have or Have Not. While in Cuba he had a chance encounter with a young photographer, Walker Evans, and they became drinking buddies. While only three years his junior, Evans idolized Hemingway. He himself had wanted to be a writer, having dropped out of Williams College and moved to Paris to pursue a literary career. After immersing himself in both the visual and literary culture of Paris, Evans returned home and took up the camera in place of the pen. |
The 44 vintage photographs in this exhibition come from Ernest Hemingway’s personal collection, the fruits of that chance encounter in Havana. Photographed and printed in Cuba in May and June of 1933, they represent Walker Evans’s first major photographic project. He was hired to provide photographic illustrations for Carleton Beals’s book The Crime of Cuba, a blistering critique of the American government’s support for Cuba’s corrupt and oppressive government. President Gerardo Machado had been elected in 1925 with an overwhelming majority, but by 1933 public opinion had turned against him. Machado stayed in power only through violent repression of his political opponents, students, and the press. Although The Crime of Cuba made the New York Times’s bestseller list, it never had the chance to affect American policy. By the time it was published, the United States had already withdrawn its support for Machado, and his bloodthirsty regime fell that August. However, the project’s photographic legacy was profound, for it was during his month in Cuba that Evans honed his signature picture-making style: an unblinking, neutral gaze applied to people and places alike. Indeed, Evans’s spare, unemotional approach, free of artifice and “artiness”, was the photographic equivalent of Hemingway’s stripped-down literary style.
Within a few years Evans would employ this same vision in his home country, documenting the lives of impoverished Americans during the Great Depression, as well as vernacular Southern architecture, as a member of the photographic unit of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. This project would culminate in the Museum of Modern Art’s first one-man photographic show, Walker Evans: American Photographs (1938), whose exhibition catalog stands as one of the most important photo books of the 20th century. A parallel project, focused specifically on tenant farmers in Alabama, resulted in the 1941 publication of the ironically titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which combined Evans’s pictures with text by James Agee. The images in both these books have become icons of the Depression and the families that lived through it.
The themes you will see in this show – street life, architecture, portraits, and poverty – would dominate Evans’s ensuing five-decade career, much of it spent at Fortune magazine. The college dropout ended his life as a professor at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, and is remembered as one of America’s greatest, and most influential, photographers.
Number of photographs: 44
Rental fee: $8500 for 8 weeks
Within a few years Evans would employ this same vision in his home country, documenting the lives of impoverished Americans during the Great Depression, as well as vernacular Southern architecture, as a member of the photographic unit of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. This project would culminate in the Museum of Modern Art’s first one-man photographic show, Walker Evans: American Photographs (1938), whose exhibition catalog stands as one of the most important photo books of the 20th century. A parallel project, focused specifically on tenant farmers in Alabama, resulted in the 1941 publication of the ironically titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which combined Evans’s pictures with text by James Agee. The images in both these books have become icons of the Depression and the families that lived through it.
The themes you will see in this show – street life, architecture, portraits, and poverty – would dominate Evans’s ensuing five-decade career, much of it spent at Fortune magazine. The college dropout ended his life as a professor at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, and is remembered as one of America’s greatest, and most influential, photographers.
Number of photographs: 44
Rental fee: $8500 for 8 weeks
| New York Time Lens Blog |