Dock Workers, Havana (Primary Title)
Walker Evans, American, 1903 – 1975 (Artist)
In 1933 Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to photograph the people and places of Havana. His trip was part of a collaboration with the author Carleton Beals to produce The Crime of Cuba, published the same year. This volume of photographs by Evans and prose by Beals recorded life in Havana under the flagging, American-supported dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. Evans’s portrait of two dock workers covered in coal dust recalls Hine’s American laborers, often pictured with their tools and set against a shallow space. Evans’s documentary impulse, first apparent in his Cuba project, served him later in a similar endeavor with the American author James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941.
Sherritt Art Purchase Fund
The Likeness of Labor, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, October 17, 2015 - April 10, 2016
©artist or artist’s estate
Some object records are not complete and do not reflect VMFA's full and current knowledge. VMFA makes routine updates as records are reviewed and enhanced.