Walker Evans, Cuba /

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 readstreet 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

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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved