Citizen in Downtown Havana

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Artist Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975)American, 1903–1975

CultureAmerican

Titles

Citizen in Downtown Havana

Date1933

PlaceHavana, Cuba

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 9 3/8 × 5 1/8 in. (23.8 × 13 cm)
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 8 1/16 in. (25.2 × 20.4 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Mrs. Efrem Kurtz in memory of Joseph Archer

Object number82.39

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionIn
1933, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to make photographs for Carleton Beals’s
book The Crime of Cuba. The
photographer and the journalist shared the goal of exposing the corruption
rampant in Cuba during Gerardo Machado’s dictatorship. They used Evans’s images
as visual documents of the social climate there. The photograph here
was not selected for publication in the book—perhaps because the cool, tall,
well-dressed gentleman who waits in line at the newsstand did not offer the
scathing critique that Beals’s editors had sought.

Provenance[Lunn Ltd., Washington, DC]; purchased by MFAH, 1982.
Exhibition History"Public Dress," The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 19 June - 8 October, 2012.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

verso bottom in pencil left to right "#543", "WEV 122.Y", "WE 1956 GI"

verso bottom center a stamp "Walker Evans" above two rectangular boxes inscribed in pencil "1", "48"

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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