Walker Evans

Cuba

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by Walker Evans,

Essay by Andrei Codrescu,

Introduction by Judith Keller

Getty Trust Publications

Due/Published July 2001, 96 pages, cloth

ISBN 0892366176

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. 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 Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu's 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. 50 duotone illus.