Walker Evans and Hemingway hanging out in Cuba

[tim atherton]

Fascinating story - and as a friend said, the makings of a movie here...!

Forgotten photos recall Havana friendship

The exhibit 'Hemingway and Evans, Three Weeks in Cuba 1933,' opening today in Key West (jan 04), recalls the brief friendship between the famous writer and soon-to-be famous photographer Walker Evans.

KEY WEST - In late spring in Havana in 1933, on the eve of Gerardo Machado regime's collapse, a shy young American photographer struck up a friendship with a slightly older, larger-than-life, egotistic American writer.

The photographer was shooting pictures for a politically charged book called The Crimes of Cuba. The writer was penning short stories, carousing and fishing. Fearful, it is believed, that the footmen of the crumbling dictatorship would confiscate his work, the photographer, Walker Evans, handed the writer, Ernest Hemingway, dozens of his prints for safekeeping.

As it turned out, even though Evans recalled being stopped and searched by soldiers, and ''once stoned by toughs,'' he left Cuba with 400 negatives intact. The film wound up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and some prints ended up in the 2001 picture book, Walker Evans: Cuba. But until recently, the relationship between Hemingway and Evans had never been proven. Nor had the photographer who shot the four dozen prints found in Hemingway's memorabilia been identified.

''They had mutual friends, similar pasts, similar paths, and were in the same place at the same time,'' said Claudia Pennington, executive director of Key West's Custom House museum. "But the fact that he and Hemingway were friends was never documented.''

The Evans prints sat in the back of Sloppy Joe's from 1939 until Hemingway's suicide in 1961, ... After Hemingway's death, his fourth wife, Mary, sorted through the mounds of carelessly piled keepsakes. She kept some of it, threw other bits away, donated some to the Monroe County Public Library, some to the Key West Art & Historical Society, some to the JFK Library in Boston, and another pile to Hemingway's old friends, Toby and Betty Bruce.

Two years ago, the Bruces' son, Benjamin, told Pennington that 46 unidentified photographs in the family's collection mirrored the prints in the Walkers Evans: Cuba book. Experts soon determined that Bruce's photographs were taken by Evans.

More pieces fell into place: a jotting from Hemingway's 1933 Havana journal was found which read, ''Dinner with Walker Evans.'' In a worm-eaten note to Hemingway, written on letterhead from a Havana hotel, Evans wrote that he had pictures, and asked to borrow money: Hemingway lent him $25. And in a 1950s letter to a publisher friend, Hemingway said of Evans, "I remember clearest what a nice kid he was.''

etc - more at http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y04/jan04/15e9.htm

(you may have to hunt it down from their archives)

[Ralph Barker]

Ah, the stuff of the faint brushing of shoulders of fate and the makings of wonderfully nostalgic exhibits. I wonder if old, long-forgotten threads here on the LF Forum will get the same attention 50 years from now when one of us is deemed famous. Does anyone archive the contents of their Palm Pilot calendars?

"Listened to a young pianist named Ansel. Uninspired. Suggested he take up photography instead." ;-)

[tim atherton]

"Listened to a young pianist named Ansel. Uninspired. Suggested he take up photography instead." ;-)

shouldn't that be "met a young photographer named Ansel. Suggested he would be better off sticking to the piano..." :-)

[David Richhart]

Interesting Tim, thanks for the post

I found your comments of interest too, Ralph, and I must agree. Letters, notebooks, and negatives get tucked away in closets and attics waiting to be rediscovered. For lack of disc space, computer generated memos and digital images are often prematurely deleted, never to be recovered...

[Bill_1856]

Thanks, Tim. I've been looking for an excuse to take the Hover down to Key West. Evans was only in Cuba for a few weeks, and it's interesting that he made prints, and not just developed his negatives. Must have taken them to the local photofinishers. My personal favorite picture of all Evan's work is the tall, lean black guy in the white linen suit and Panama hat.

[John Kasaian]

Somehow I find the thought Papa in fatigues, gray beard tucked under the chinstrap of a GI steel pot, .45 in hand driving a spavined jeep filled with marquis, wheeling up to the Louvre under a barrage from a nazi 88 for the express purpose of liberating Lartigue's negatives rather romantic.

Hemingway and Walker Evans is deciededly more difficult to imagine. Maybe seated in a waterfront bar playing gin with a deck of badly soiled playing cards and a clock on the wall ticking loudly. What would they talk about? Cigars? Chicks? Salt water lures? Angostura bitters?

Now Hemingway and Edward Weston---theres a story I'd like to see on the big screen! Better yet, Hemingway, Weston and Edgar Rice Burroughs! A group of peasants would hire them to protect their village from a marauding gang of post-modernists who ride into the tiny pueblo once a year to burn the crops, steal chickens and make off with the chicks---hey, theres a movie!

[tim atherton]

bill - note that this was from january

[Mark Sampson]

Interesting- it was a smaller world then. Evans had been to Paris, (where Hemingway had made his reputation) and turned to photography after giving up the idea of becoming a writer- allegedly because of his enormous respect for good writing and his own struggles at the typewriter. Hemingway was a success by then, Evans was penniless but just finding his metier. Perhaps they drank rum at the Floridita...