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

Book 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.

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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

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.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly