Walker Evans's Psychogeographic Mapping of Havana, 1933
2013; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03087298.2013.815458
ISSN2150-7295
Autores Tópico(s)Photographic and Visual Arts
ResumoAbstract This article re-interprets the American photographer Walker Evans's Havana portfolio from a perspective that combines psychology and geography. By taking this approach, the article intends to reflect further on a number of the photographer's developing methods and processes, which were implemented whilst documenting his visit to the Cuban capital. In this discussion a number of theoretical issues relating to the medium of photography emerge in a way that examines the relationship between photography and psychogeography. This is illustrated via an exploration of the photographer’s practice with reference to psychogeography itself and is developed with reference to the act of urban wandering and the figure of the flâneur. These inform the photographer's visual understanding of the physical presence of the city, upon which he attempts to imprint himself in a way that is both involving and deliberately disassociative. Keywords: Walker Evans (1903–75)HavanaCubadocumentary photographypsychogeography flâneur Acknowledgments I wish to acknowledge Edmundo Desnoes, Miriam Haddu, John Perivolaris, and Christopher Hull for their thoughtful comments and criticisms on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also thankful to Maximiliano Francisco Trujillo Lemes at the University of Havana and Jorge Félix Cisneros Espronceda at the Office of the City Historian in Havana for their help in identifying a number of the photographed locations discussed in this essay. I am also grateful for the financial support of Santander Group, and for the insightful comments of the anonymous peer reviewers and editors of the journal, which helped to improve this article. Notes 1 – See Walker Evans, Walker Evans: Havana 1933, New York: Pantheon Books 1989; and Walker Evans, Walker Evans: Cuba, Los Angeles: John Paul Getty Museum 2001. 2 – Ana María Dopico, ‘Picturing Havana: History, Vision, and the Scramble for Cuba’, Nepantla: Views from South, 3:3 (2002), 457. 3 – Ibid., 457–8. 4 – Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography, Harpenden: Pocket Essentials 2010, 12–13. 5 – Ibid., 9–10. 6 – Ibid., 11. 7 – See Keith Tester, The Flâneur, London: Routledge 1994; Geoff Nicholson, The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, Philosophy, and Literature of Pedestrianism, New York: Riverhead Books 2008; and Coverley, Psychogeography. 8 – Zygmunt Bauman, ‘Desert Spectacular’, in The Flâneur, ed. Keith Tester, London: Routledge 1994, 138. 9 – Franz Hessel, Ein Flaneur in Berlin, Berlin: Das Arsenal 1984. 10 – Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, London: Verso 2001. 11 – Walker Evans, Personal diary dated 1932, Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1994.250.95. 12 – James Mellow, Walker Evans, New York: Basic Books 1999, 178. 14 – Guy Debord, ‘Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography’ (1955), in Situationist International Anthology, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb, Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets 1981, 5. 13 – Coverley, Psychogeography, 31–2. 15 – Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. Jonathan Mayne, 2nd edn, London: Phaidon 1995, 9. 16 – Jeff L. Rosenheim and Douglas Eklund, ‘Family Albums 1898–1916’, in Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology: Selections from the Walker Evans Archive, Department of Photographs, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Jeff L. Rosenheim and Douglas Eklund, Zurich: Scalo in association with the Metropolitan Museum of Art 2000, 16–17. 17 – Maria Morris Hambourg, ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, in Walker Evans, ed. Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund and Mia Fineman, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2000, 10. 18 – Gilles Mora, ‘Introduction’, in Walker Evans, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, London: Thames and Hudson 2004, 12. 19 – Mellow, Walker Evans, 401. 20 – William G. Niederland, ‘Introduction’, in Maps from the Mind: Readings in Psychogeography, ed. Howard F. Stein and William G. Niederland, Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press 1989, xix. 21 – Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography, New York: Mariner 2000, 28. 22 – Ibid. 23 – Walker Evans, ‘Chère Avis, Avis Chère’, in Unclassified, ed. Rosenheim and Eklund, 39–41. 24 – Hambourg, ‘A Portrait of the Artist’, 15; and Leslie Katz, ‘An Interview with Walker Evans’, in Photography in Print: Writings from 1876 to the Present, ed. Vicky Goldberg, New York: Simon and Schuster 1981, 358–69. 25 – Mellow, Walker Evans, 214. 26 – Walker Evans, ‘The Reappearance of Photography’, Hound and Horn, 5 (October–December 1931), 126. 27 – See Rathbone, Walker Evans, 80; and Mora, ‘Introduction’, 12. 28 – Evans, Personal diary dated 1932. 29 – Walter Benjamin, The arcades project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press 1999, 417. 30 – Ibid. 31 – Evans, Personal diary dated 1932. 32 – Ibid. 33 – Mellow, Walker Evans, 176. 34 – Coverley, Psychogeography, 38. 35 – Mellow, Walker Evans, 179–80; and Rathbone, Walker Evans, 80. 36 – Ernest Hemingway, To Have and Have Not, London: Penguin 1972, 7. 37 – Coverley, Psychogeography, 14. 38 – Edmundo Desnoes, ‘Walker Evans – Havana 1933’, Aperture (Summer 1990), 75. 39 – Ibid., 76. 40 – Edmundo Desnoes, ‘Cuba Made Me So’ (1985), reprinted in The Photography Reader, ed. Liz Wells, London: Routledge 2003, 311. 41 – Evans, Personal diary dated 1932. 42 – Desnoes, ‘Walker Evans’, 76. 43 – Pierre Mayol, ‘The Street Trade’, in The Practice of Everyday Life. Vol. 2, Living and Cooking, ed. Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard and Pierre Mayol, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 1998, 83. 44 – Stuart Hall, ‘The Work of Representation’, in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices, ed. Stuart Hall, London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage in association with the Open University 1997, 56–61. 45 – Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, London: Penguin Books 2004, 50. 46 – Douglas Eklund, ‘Exile's Return: The Early Work, 1928–34’, in Walker Evans, ed. Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund and Mia Fineman, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2000, 45. 47 – Ibid. 48 – Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba, trans. Kenneth Hall, London: Faber and Faber 1994, 99. 49 – Henri Cartier-Bresson, An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson, London: Thames and Hudson 2006, unpaginated. 50 – Solnit, Wanderlust, 199. 51 – Coverley, Psychogeography, 65. 52 – Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba, 97–9. 53 – Coverley, Psychogeography, 101. 54 – Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, Berkeley: University of California Press 1988, 115. 55 – Will Self, Psychogeography, London: Bloomsbury 2007, 11.
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