WALKER EVANS: HAVANA 1933
Gilles Mora [essay] and John T. Hill [sequence]
Gilles Mora [essay] and John T. Hill [sequence]: WALKER EVANS: HAVANA 1933. New York City: Pantheon Books, 1989. First American edition [First edition: Contrejours, Paris, 1989]. Quarto. Black cloth titled in gray. Printed dust jacket. 112 pp. 80 duotone plates. Jacket lightly rubbed, trivial wear overall. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. A nearly fine copy in a nearly fine dust jacket.
8.5 x 11.25 hard cover book with 112 pages and 80 duotone photographs.
From the publisher: "This book brings together for the first time over 80 stunning images of pre-revolutionary Cuba, the core of Walker Evans' first great body of work. Perhaps the most important of all American photographers, he is best known for his pictures for 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men' and for the Farm Security Administration, which convey an almost miraculous sense of time and place and social climate. His photographs of Havana, taken just a few years earlier, brilliantly accomplish the same thing in a very different context.
These pages present us with powerful images of the full range of life in a vibrant, politically turbulent tropical city. They introduce us to prostitutes, laborers, and policemen, to lively street corners, magnificent public buildings, and desolate slums. All the hallmarks of Evans' mature style, its gritty directness, immediacy, and feeling for the 'common man,' are strikingly in evidence here. Gilles Mora and Evans' executor John T. Hill selected the pictures from over 400 Evans took in Havana. Mora's perceptive text sheds light on their character and importance as well as on the circumstances of their creation. Some of them initially appeared in the now-forgotten book on Cuban politics for which they were commissioned. A few became world-famous. But many are published here for the first time."