Walker Evans went to Havana in 1933 on an assignment to supply photographs for a book by Carleton Beals called The Crime of Cuba, which was a polemic against the American-backed dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. Some of the pictures he took actually look as though they were meant to illustrate a political tract, although the three most action-packed pictures in the book were the work of others, selected by Evans from the files of Havana newspapers. Mostly, however, Evans followed his own inclinations and documented his own interests, and if these happened to intersect with the nominal subject of his assignment, so much the better. (He was to pursue the same tactic a few years later, when he toured the American South under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration.) Evans was of course friendly toward the book’s political stance, but he was primarily interested in elegance, in particular the kind of natural, unstudied elegance that has nothing to do with fashion and that can’t be faked, the elegance that is available to the poor.
When he photographs an encounter between a policeman and an old woman, for instance, the picture may superficially look reportorial because of the cop’s turned back and the woman’s scowl, but you know that what Evans is really after is the way the woman crosses her ankles and wears her scarf. She has obviously had a hard life, but she carries herself with a panache that would turn heads on the Rue du Bac. The young woman with rolled stockings leaning on a trash can may well be a prostitute, but she could just as easily be a movie star. The citizen in his white suit and straw boater is merely waiting, for something or somebody, in front of a newsstand in an arcade, but his demeanor is nothing less than imperial.
Evans is equally impressed by the elegance of wrought-iron grilles (the most basic and artful of security devices), of improvised displays of second-hand tin cans, of curbside kitchens employed by sandwich vendors. Above all he is in thrall to signs, the sort of signs that exude elegance precisely because they are gaudy, rococo, overcooked or else primitive, untutored, archaic—signs whose stylishness can only be enhanced by the punishment of time, weather, and neglect. Evans was passionate about signs all his life. The only family photo he went to the trouble of mounting was one that showed his youthful parents in front of an enormous billboard in Chicago; in his old age he filled his New Haven apartment with faded, rusted, or bullet-scarred specimens he dragged in from the field. His taste was omnivorous—he liked signs for nationally advertised products as much as those for strictly local enterprises, movie posters as well as menus painted directly on the walls of cheap restaurants.
If you are inclined to see Evans’s Havana photos as mere depictions of exotica, you might consider that those movie posters were pretty much the same ones that ornamented theaters on his own street in New York City. Not only was Evans driven by an insatiable visual hunger that can at times seem either childlike or perverted, he also enjoyed thinking of himself, wherever he went, as documenting Pompeii just before the volcano blew. He knew that the monuments would be excavated and restored; what would be obliterated were those small and handmade or loud and disposable artifacts—advertising, whatever its less savory qualities, is always highly perishable. It’s not that he wanted to save those things from obliteration, though. He loved decay, entropy, ruin, and he liked nothing better than to witness its progress. It was an ongoing activity on the part of nature that could be considered art, that created even as it destroyed. He prized the vulnerable human gesture equally for its heedless bravery and for its unavoidable doom. He preserved it in photographs not because he wanted to arrest its disappearance, but because he wanted to participate in its making.
Luc Sante is the author of several books, including Low Life, Evidence, and the volume on Walker Evans in Phaidon’s “55” series.
