Walker Evans: Havana 1933
by: Mora, Gilles

Hardcover. New York , Pantheon, 1st US, 1989, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, 111 pages, illustrated throughout in b&w. Light edgewear and rubbing to dust jacket. Faint foxing to top edge, otherwise a clean, tight copy. In April 1933 an editor at Lippincott asked Evans to take photographs for a polemical book by Carlton Beals, a leftist writer who was very critical of the then Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado and anxious to show how American support of Machado had created an economic catastrophe in Cuba. Evans agreed after acceptance of his conditions that he have complete freedom to choose the photographs for publication and that they be collected at the end of the book so that they appeared to be an independent entity and not simply illustration of the text. Indeed, according to legend, Evans had not read Beals's text when he went to Havana in May 1933. He was in Cuba for three weeks. When his personal funds ran out, his way was paid for by Ernest Hemingway; the two had never met before, but Hemingway was eager for the company of someone equally qualified in literary conversation and in drinking. In the end, Evans contributed thirty-one photographs to the published "The Crime of Cuba". This book, WALKER EVANS: HAVANA 1933, contains seventy of the photographs Evans took in Cuba, including most of the photographs he selected for "The Crime of Cuba". The volume is introduced by an excellent essay by Gilles Mora that gives the historical background and discusses the place of Evans's Cuban photographs in his overall body of work. The photographs were selected by Mora and by John T. Hill, who also was responsible for the sequencing of their presentation. (One of Mora's points is that Evans attached a great deal of significance to the sequencing of his photographs, any collection of which he viewed as a composite artistic/documentary statement and, as such, more important than any single photograph.)