Postcard Havana

Walker Evans was a lifelong collector of postcards – by the time of his death in 1975 he had acquired more than 9,000 examples, all filed away in shoe-boxes and now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Evans expressed a strong preference for cards produced before 1925 and held a very low opinion of cards produced after that date. It’s unlikely that his Havana trip of 1933 added much, if anything to his collection, and some of those shown here would not have met with his approval. For a longer discussion of Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard from 10 years ago, please follow this link.

The city views of Havana show a neat, tidy and well mannered colonial capital with a fine stock of Spanish Baroque buildings and pre-date Evans’s visit by about three decades. Widespread civic neglect and a rising tide of corruption and criminality later left their mark on the city. What Evans saw and recorded in 1933 was blistering paint, crumbling plaster and networks of subsidence cracks. The final postcard shows the famous Hotel Nacional which opened for business in 1930. In October 1933 it would sustain serious damage as a result of gun battles between pro-Battista and anti Battista factions, following the deposal of Machado. Still more postcards from Havana can be seen by following these links, Havana Deserta, Calle Obispo and Baling Tobacco.

Off the Shelf: The Crime of Cuba

In the course of 50 years, Carleton Beals (1893–1979), wrote and published more than 50 books, many of them on Latin-American subjects. He never wavered in his support for left wing causes and in his latter years wrote in defence of Castro’s Cuban Revolution. Beals produced this book, The Crime of Cuba, in less than 3 months after a visit to Cuba in late 1932. It reads as an angry denunciation of American interference in the island’s politics and economy. Following an account of Cuba’s troubled history under Spanish rule and the virtual eradication of the indigenous population, Beals describes how the US government reserved the right to intervene militarily in the defence of “political order and private property” via the passage of the Platt Amendment in 1901 in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. When Beals visited in 1932, the island was gripped by political unrest and violence as resistance mounted to the tyrannical rule of dictator, Gerardo Machado. The book presents a charge-sheet of Machado’s abuses of power, flagrant disregard for human rights and brutal campaign of intimidation and assassination directed against his political opponents in the press, the student movement and the trade unions.

Beals’s book was to be published by Lippincott in summer 1933. A senior editor at the publisher, Ernestine Evans, recommended Walker Evans to provide some photographic content. Despite being short of both work and cash, Evans presented a surly and truculent face to Beals on the occasion of their one and only meeting, insisting that his photos should be bound in at the end of the text in a sequence to be determined by him. Evans spent 3 weeks in Havana, taking photographs and hanging out with Ernest Hemingway, who co-opted Evans as his nightly drinking partner. More than 400 photos were taken, from which Evans selected 64 for submission to the publisher. He indicated a group of 31 for publication. Although Evans as a Manhattan bohemian was often in the company of Marxists and Communist party members, he was no radical. Fastidious to a point, he would always hold himself apart from progressive politics, which made him a curious choice for this assignment. On the streets of Havana, Evans could not escape the evidence of the brutality of the Machado regime, but he refrained from making it the central point of his photography. What he ended up with was something he was much more comfortable with – a rich portrait of the vitality of the city’s street life. Poverty and deprivation were part of that portrait, and presented with the studied neutrality that Evans brought to all his work. For the most part, Evans was drawn to subjects that had preoccupied him back in New York – detailed scrutiny of the built environment, outdoor advertising, hand painted signage, street traders and sidewalk compositions with figures. Portrait subjects were mostly dock workers, sex workers and street people. A minority of photos were taken in the suburbs and surrounding small towns and illustrated the ubiquitous dilapidation and decay, once the faded grandeur of the Baroque city centre was left behind.

By the time The Crime of Cuba was published on August 17th. 1933, Machado’s grip on power was ended – he fled into exile on August 12th. His excesses were no longer acceptable to the US government who brokered his removal from offices. Ever the optimist, the artist Ben Shahn (longtime friend of Evans) predicted a victory for the proletariat in post-Machado Cuba. It was Evans who would be proved correct when he predicted an increase in comfort for the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and nothing for the proletariat. As for the book – it contained 31 of Evans’s photos plus 3 that he selected from local newspaper archives in Havana and by their content and location at the back of the book, they formed a tonal counterpoint to Beals’s polemic, while providing a context for the political and social drama that Beals was describing. For Evans, the experience would serve as a rehearsal for his contribution to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941, where his photographs would again occupy their own exclusive space, only this time they would appear at the front of the book. 

Long Story Short: Long-winded, left-wing propagandist engages services of fancy photographer to bring some visual interest to dreary diatribe of anti-Americanism.

Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard

Walker Evans is my favourite photographer. I’ve flirted with many other excellent practitioners but I always come back to Evans. From the landmark FSA photos to the late colour work and Polaroids, everything is the product of a distinctive sensibility and demands serious attention. The work he did for Fortune magazine is equally fascinating and I have many of the portfolios in their original form as published. For over 30 years (1934-65) Evans had his photographs published in the pages of Fortune and eventually manoeuvred himself into the enviable position of virtually self-publishing in a mass circulation magazine as he graduated from staff photographer to associate editor. He had the authority to initiate his own projects and he pushed the technical staff to the limits of their abilities in his demands for excellence in print quality. He was even permitted to indulge his personal obsessions and in May 1948 Fortune published a four page portfolio of colour reproductions of “postcards from the trolley-car period” (life size and complete with drop shadows) from Evans’s collection under the title “Main Street Looking North From Courthouse Square”. This was the first published evidence of a collecting activity that had absorbed Evans since childhood.Follow this link to the wonderful world of Visual Telling of Stories to view the article.

One of my more pleasant recurring dreams is acquiring a copy of a spectacular illustrated book on a subject dear to my heart, lost in wondrous reverie that its existence had been unknown to me. (These sumptuous volumes usually turn out on awakening to have titles like The Definitive Atlas of Thimbles or An Architectural History of the Cricket Pavilion, Volume 2, The Renaissance.) Occasionally one of these books makes a surprise and most welcome appearance in the real world and one such is the recently published, Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard. Evans had a very special passion for postcards and his collection numbered over 9,000 and is now the subject of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Jeff Rosenheim, now described as “the foremost scholar of Walker Evans” has made a choice selection for inclusion in this book to accompany the exhibition, although just how choice no one can say without seeing the other 8,000+ that had to be left out.

Evans was an unorthodox collector of cards. He had no interest in collecting for its own sake in definitive and narrow categories – his prime interest was in the vernacular and visual qualities. The unconscious and unsought poetic image captured his imagination. He rejoiced in the happy accidents and the wonders of photographic retouching. Vintage postcards often went through an exhaustive editing process in which it was as common for the retoucher to add features of interest as to eliminate unwanted intrusions. These interventions, made with wildly differing levels of skill, often add another layer of mystery to the image with discrepancies of scale and visual inconsistencies. Indeed, on many occasions, the greater the incompetence, the more profound the sense of mystery. Evans commented on the number of occasions on which the unwanted intrusion, often in the form of undistinguished means of transport (horse and buggy, steam tram, vintage vehicle), became the prime focus of interest for a future generation. Postcard images also possessed the facility to unintentionally recall images from the world of Fine Art. The tilting planes and perspectival plunges of Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings can be seen in many a vintage postcard.

This is no place for objectivity. I have to confess that the Evans vision of a world in postcards is irresistible to me. The idea of a lyric documentary in which the neutrality of an accumulation of mechanically acquired visual data is systemically undermined by the process of reproduction and consumption, is extremely attractive. The original image is successively processed in terms of adding colour, retouching by addition or subtraction, adjustment of tonal qualities, resizing for portability, and cropping to fit. By the time this process is complete, the resulting image describes a world that has never existed. It’s at this point that it can burrow deep into the imagination, becoming the stuff of dreams and fantasies, and posing all sorts of questions about how we see the world around us. The visual grammar of postcards creates a parallel reality in which the familiar and commonplace is subtly transformed into a new and enhanced visual experience. In one of several lectures delivered on the subject of postcards, Evans memorably quoted from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel, The Gift, in which the author describes to perfection the sense of quiet wonder that the recollection of the unremarkable passage of a train through the landscape can inspire. Nabokov’s unique ability to analyse the sense of time past clearly struck a chord with Evans as he recognised a kindred spirit.

The lazy response to this book is to dismiss the images as a feast of unhealthy nostalgia. Nostalgia is something that begins as harmless fun, sharing reminiscences from a distant era or responding to visual triggers that transport the mind back to an all but forgotten past. Where it ends is far from harmless as it degenerates into a pervasive sourness of intellect in which all experience of the present is filtered through a largely imaginary sense of a lost Golden Age from which all past horrors have been erased. It seems to be the fate of every generation in turn to surrender to this comforting fiction. Unfortunately many of the most reactionary expressions of the human spirit have their origins in these acts of selective memory. When nostalgia corrodes the soul, the sense of a false and imagined past becomes fixed as the only desirable template for the present leaving no space for alternative historical interpretation and denying the possibility of human creativity in the present. There’s a very strong case for designating nostalgia as a controlled substance.

So, all this waffle is designed to armour-plate this postcard fan from accusations of being a consumer of nostalgic imagery. A sudden encounter with a familiar scene as it existed in the past produces a fascination that can often have a nostalgic inflection but this does not lead to a burning desire to see the unsightly telegraph lines of yesteryear reinstated or a return to the days of unregulated, large scale advertising images and slogans applied to every available vertical surface. But, what we can learn from postcards about early advertising is that its practitioners were no less sophisticated than their modern descendants and equally untroubled by moral scruples.

Evans as an artist was propelled by an inexhaustible curiosity about the visual world that he maintained to the end of his life. Postcard imagery was just one expression of his search for very specific visual sensations. The great joy of this book for the postcard addict like myself is that what is often seen by others as a completely valueless and self-indulgent activity devoid of purpose is worthy of serious consideration and can actually have an unsuspected significance. It was pleasing to discover that 3 of the postcards reproduced in this book are also in my collection (that’s 3 out of 9,000) and are included in this posting together with a small selection that I hope would have met with his approval.