Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #317158 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 96 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In 1933, fledgling photographer Walker Evans was asked to make photographs of Cuban society for radical journalist Carleton Beals's book The Crime of Cuba, an expos‚ about Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado's corruption and Cuba's exploitation by the US. In Walker Evans: Cuba, from the collection at the Getty Museum, the 73 images of people, urban landscapes and Cuban business-as-usual seem influenced by Diego Rivera's politicized content, Hemingway's "stripped down, minimal style" and the "characteristic emptiness" of Eugene Atget's photography, says the Getty's Associate Curator Judith Keller in her introduction. This portrait of pre-Castro Cuba reminds viewers that Cuba has experienced social strife since early on, and that Cuban-U.S. relations have long been problematic. Poet and novelist Andrei Codrescu's essay investigates Evans's artistic and political sensibilities at this early point in his career, and the entrenched complexities of the country he attempted to represent.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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 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.

Customer Reviews

to unravel Cuba
. I first took a look at the photographs in the book and I guess made a few assumptions about the pictures. Then, I actually took the time to really read the whole thing, then my previous opinions changed. See when a person first looks at photograph they don't see everything. After reading the text I really enjoyed what was said about each photograph. The descriptions took the photographs into a different setting and it broadened my view on matters.
It was interesting how Carlton Beals, the radical journalist would have described some of the photographs. I was surprised how negative Beals wanted everything to be. Evans just allows the audience to have an open mind when viewing his photos, not like Beals who wants to tell you the way he wants things to be. Regardless, people will have their own opinions about certain photos, but that is what makes photography so interesting. The text is not very long, but it goes a long way in giving insight to the status of Cuba in 1933. After reading and looking at this book I have a better understanding of how Walker Evans works his magic. This is a great book to own!!

THEY DIDN'T SMILE AS MUCH BEFORE CASTRO!
Everybody knows the stereotype all too well of the joyous Cubans, with their 8-day Carnavals, incredible music and high culture. As someone who visits the island frequently (my wife lives there) the happiness of the people is so uplifting. The suicide rate is so much lower there. The murder rate is way below that of the US. It is a cocaine-free society because of all of the anti-cocaine canine patrols in the major cities. It's really a revelation being there. No drugs, no homelessness (the right to shelter is guaranteed under the Cuban constitution), a LOWER infant mortality rate than the United States, more doctors per capita than Canada, Sweden, and the US, a 97 per cent literacy rate.

This book however is a REAL eye-opener. I have only experienced Cuba after President Castro took office. I have only seen his good work in a country where EVERY schoolhouse now contains at least one Pentium III computer or better (don't you wish you could say the same about the USA?).

The fotos inside this book are unbelievable. Absolute abject shoeless, starvation poverty, photos taken from a pre-Castro Cuba. Looks like modern day Haiti, a country which has subjected to US policies from Papa Doc, to Baby Doc, to Aristide, all handpicked by the CIA and look what a mess that country is.

These fotos and the commentary inside are a revelation. If you EVER wondered why the people revolted and continue to adore President Castro, buy this book! These fotos don't lie. There is NO ONE living like this in present-day Cuba....

Incredible images from pre-revolutionary Cuba
Walker Evans was one of the greatest social realists and here he displays the same eye for understated emotion and quiet resistance that he showed in his famous WPA photographs in the American South. If you're familiar with the work of the visionary Brazilian Sebastião Salgado, Evans shows an earlier, perhaps gentler aspect of that vision of Latin America's poor.

The idea that photographing the poor in pre-revolutionary Cuba is "shameful" is in itself shameful. Did you want pictures of gangsters in nightclubs living the high life?