Walker Evans

Walker Evans (Saint Louis, Missouri, US, 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, US, 1975) wanted to be a writer, then became a press photographer and reputed professor as well as a reporter. His photographs have become part of the History of art in their own right; his projects and photobooks can without doubt be said to have marked the development of photography over the following decades, and some of his images have become icons of the modern age. His work for the Farm Security Administration photographic project, supported by the government of Franklin D. Roosevelt and coordinated by Roy Stryker, brought together a group of outstanding photographers whose ranks include Dorothea Lange, Ben Shann, Louise Rosskam and Jack Delano.

Havana 1933 brings together Evan’s photographic illustrations for The Crime of Cuba, a book by the politically committed writer Carleton Beals, made over a period of three weeks in spring 1933, when the island was being governed by Gerardo Machado. Machado’s government, which ended the same year, had turned into a bloody dictatorship. The scenes in this series show ordinary people like peasant farmers, prostitutes, beggars and the unemployed, but also the Cuban elite in Evans’ characteristic compositions: different types of architecture, urban signposting, frontal views and a certain distancing, which is not cold but reveals Evans as a great observer and newcomer to Cuban reality.

This exhibition was the first to bring together all of the photographs in the Havana series, practically unseen until then. It underscored Evans’ importance in later photographic history. The American photographer can unmistakeably be situated as a key figure in the transition between what we know as documentary photography and photography as an artistic or “plastic” discipline as defined by Dominique Baqué.