Walker Evans in Cuba

View Down Dirt Road with People and Donkey in Foreground, Cuba

Finding Cuban art in New York is not easy. I searched for
exhibits of Cuban artists on Google and could only find records of past
exhibitions. I decided to go to the Met, for surely they would have some
samplings of Cuban art. Wrong! I scoured the Central and South American
galleries and couldn’t find one piece from Cuba. I did see a lot of beautiful
gold jewelry and vessels from Peru and Colombia, but I have no idea if these
artifacts would remotely resemble anything from Cuba. Next
I went to the photography floor, hoping to see some of Walker Evan’s black and
white photographs taken in Havana. Although the Met has many of Walker’s photos
of Cuba in their permanent collection, none were on view. I did find a book on
Evans in the gift shop, and decided to look at his photographs online.

 Walker
Evans is an American photographer who worked in Havana, Cuba in 1933. The first
pictures I looked at focused on Havana’s architecture and local street scene.
His photographs of La Catedral de la Virgen María de la Concepción are all shot
from below, which portrays the church in a reverent air-it’s height makes it
imposing. There is a stark contrast between the grandiosity of the church and
the shabbiness of rural Cuban homes.

            Many
of the images in Walker’s photographs are familiar to me after watching the
movie Soy Cuba. One photograph of
American sailors walking near the trolley tracks reminds me of a scene in Soy
Cuba when a group of American sailors chase
and harass a Cuban girl. Walker’s photograph of the sailors seems to hold no
negative connotation, but after the unfavorable portrayal of the raunchy
American sailors in Soy Cuba,
their presence in Cuba seems sinister.

            Walker’s
photographs seem to hint at the underlying turmoil of Cuban society during the
1930s.  It can be seen in the
photographs of beggars and men sleeping on the street, the wild wind, and a
young boy’s corpse. Much has happened in Cuba since the 1930s, and I am curious
to see whether Walker’s version of Cuba can still be seen.