Walking in the footsteps of Walker Evans
Eight decades after Walker Evans first documented the island of Cuba, I joined a group of photographers challenged to reexamine and revisit Evans’s work. In my preparations for the trip I was influenced by these words by a Japanese poet:
“Seek not to follow in the footsteps of men of old; seek what they sought.”
As I walked many of the same Havana streets I was challenged to do more than re-photograph the locations that Evans had in 1933. I was guided by a few references to Evans’s desire to capture people unaware, in a private bubble of self, and also look for examples of urban geometry with an eye for the vernacular. These two themes resonated with my interests in design as well as recent work exploring the idea of in-between moments, the insignificant moments at pause or in transition. These moments are ordinary, not decisive or monumental, but like Evans I sought to make the ordinary beautiful.
