A new exhibition, Walker Evans in Cuba: The Ernest Hemingway Collection, is on display through June 12 at the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art in Altoona, Pennsylvania, then travels 150 miles to Annville, Pennsylvania, for display at the Lebanon Valley College Museum from August 28 to October 11.
In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, the acclaimed 33-year-old writer Ernest Hemingway rented a 30-foot boat from a friend and embarked on a fishing expedition from Key West, Florida to Havana, Cuba. He would spend several months on the island, an experience he would turn into his fifth novel, To Have and Have Not. While there, he also had a chance encounter with a young photographer, Walker Evans, and the two became drinking buddies. The 44 vintage photographs in this exhibition, all printed in Cuba, come from Hemingway’s personal collection, the fruits of that chance encounter in Havana.
The project’s photographic legacy was profound, for it was during his month in Cuba that Evans honed his signature picture-making style: an unblinking, neutral gaze applied to people and places alike. Indeed, Evans’s spare, unemotional approach, free of artifice and “artiness,” was the photographic equivalent of Hemingway’s stripped-down literary style.
Walker Evans in Cuba: The Ernest Hemingway Collection is organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions, LLC, www.art2art.org. All prints courtesy of the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg.
The Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art
1210 11th Ave.
Altoona, PA 16601
www.sama-art.org
