With its new exhibition, A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles presents three distinct moments in Cuban history, as depicted by renowned early 20th-century photographer Walker Evans, by Cuban photographers of the Revolution, and by three contemporary photographers. The show’s curator, Judith Keller, senior curator in the department of photography at the museum, spoke with Cuban Art News about the exhibition, its photographers, and what she calls “lyrical documentary.”

Tell us how the show came about.

The impetus was the Walker Evans collection, and the fact that we have the largest collection of Walker Evans’s photographs in the world. We have many more of his 1933 Cuba pictures than are in the book we published in 2001 [Walker Evans: Cuba]. In particular, we have quite a large holding of the prints that he made at that time, in the 1930s.

I proposed that we do a show of the Evans pictures from the 1930s. The plans for the larger show, with later photography from other parts of Cuban history, evolved from that first proposal. So the impetus really was what was in our collection—the Evans pictures from 1933.

That’s typical of exhibitions that the department of photography does here. Often they’re drawn entirely from our own holdings. For this exhibition, about two-thirds to three-quarters of the show, in the end, will be from our collection.

The show has three sections: Walker Evans’s 1933 photographs of Cuba; the early years of the Revolution as depicted by Cuban photographers of that era; and contemporary Cuba as seen by three young photographers from abroad. What’s the thematic thread that links them all?

The three contemporary photographers who make up the last section are all very much aware of Walker Evans’s work—of his whole career, but the Havana pictures in particular. One of them, Alex Harris, was a student of Evans’s at Yale University. So Evans is an important influence on each of those three people. Alexey Titarenko is a Russian photographer whom we’re including—the work he did in Cuba is very much focused on the same subjects that Evans tackled: the colonial architecture of Havana and the people on the streets there in Havana, what the storefronts look like, and how people spend their leisure time on the streets. Both Alex Harris and Virginia Beahan [the other contemporary artist] are documentary photographers in the tradition of Evans, in that they use large cameras on tripods and are very much interested in a straightforward, unmanipulated way of practicing documentary. Now Harris and Beahan are both working with the large color format, which has become more popular among photographic artists. So their work is as much about the composition and the palette as it is about the subject matter. Their work is not journalistic, it’s personal—not work they’re doing for a newspaper or magazine. You could call it something like ‘lyrical documentary.’ Evans had his own term for what he did, which was ‘transcendent documentary.’ So those three contemporary photographers each borrow from Evans the standards and the style that he created in the 1930s.

The Cuban photographers in the second section of the show, who were working at the time of the Revolution, are more in the vein of Life magazine photographers—photojournournalists. Evans himself worked for Fortune magazine for many years, so he was definitely tied to a magazine and did work on assignment on particular subjects. Photographers like Osvaldo Salas and Alberto Korda were working for the Revolution. They were hired to provide imagery for the newspaper called Revolution, which the revolutionary movement set up and wanted to be heavily illustrated. They wanted the photographs that these photographers made to continue putting the message in front of people all the time. This proved to be a very effective tool for the Revolution. But it came out of earlier American newspapers and photojournalists like Margaret Bourke-White and W. Eugene Smith, who worked for the American magazines in the 1930s and ’40s, after Life and Look and Fortune were started.

And the differences among these photographers? How would you characterize those?

For one thing, there are differences in the kind of prints they made. Evans was making small prints, which was what photographers in the 1930s for the most part did—most of them are smaller than 8x10. He made the prints himself. As people who come to the exhibition will see, the prints are quite dark. That was the way he preferred to print at that time. It does give a sort of gloomy or sinister mood to the images, but that was just his preferred way of printing at the time. He worked in Cuba with both a small 35mm Leica as well as a camera on a tripod. This was an early commission for him, and he was trying out different cameras and different techniques while he was there. These prints were all prints that were [still] in his possession, in his collection—that’s why they’re now in the museum. He had held on to them as personal work. He provided a small number of prints to the publishers of the book The Crime of Cuba (1933). But he made a lot of his own pictures while he was there.

The Cuban photographers who were working during the Revolution, or for the newspapers afterward, used 35mm cameras so they could photograph the action, whether it was a press conference or Fidel Castro hiking through the Sierra Maestra. They were on the spot, and they wanted to photograph the action that was happening. The prints were often made by a lab at the newspaper, and they tended to be mass-produced, made in large numbers. They were intended as news and as propaganda. A lot of them ended up in public buildings. For instance, the official portrait of Che that we have in the show—that was [widely distributed] so everyone would know what he, as the Minister of Industry for the Revolution, looked like.

And then with the contemporary work, as I mentioned, two of the photographers work in this large color format now, so their prints are made by a lab that specializes in fine color printing. Although they also use tripod-mounted cameras like Evans was doing. Alexey Titarenko, who also uses a large camera, does make his own prints, which are black-and-white and beautifully toned to create a very special atmosphere. It’s pretty unusual for a photographer nowadays to do that, but that’s one of the things that makes his work exceptional.

Each of these different people or groups reflects what was very much the practice or trend in photography at the time, in their own epoch or era. I would say that the Revolution-era photographers were sort of catching up in terms of photojournalism, because they hadn’t had the support, the resources, and backing to have the cameras, to travel, to have someone printing their work, to have newspapers that really wanted a lot of activity in photojournalism in Cuba. This was really a new thing there.

This is the second significant show on photography in Cuba that Cuban Art News has covered in the past six months or so, the other one being the show Cuba in Revolution at the International Center of Photography. Would you say that Cuba is coming onto the radar of the photographic community these days?

That’s a good question. The ICP show represented a lot of the same photographers we’ll have in our show, and it was about the 1950s and 60s in Cuba. So it was representing a particular kind of Cuban photography, most of it photojournalism. And I think that, yes, in terms of that kind of photographer and that era in Cuba, that between exhibitions and some recent publications of individual Cuban photographers, or selections of their images of Che or Fidel that were done during their lifetimes, that that has gotten into the mainstream more. Yes.

In terms of Cuban photographers who are producing work there—and I know that there are a lot of them, and some very good ones—I don’t think that that is getting much exposure. Certainly not as much as it should.

Any contemporary Cuban photographers in particular who have caught your eye?

I have to say that there is nobody we’re actively looking for, no one that we’re trying to acquire at the moment. It’s not surprising that there are so few Cuban photographers being shown in New York or L.A. galleries. I think it’s hard for them to get noticed unless dealers go to Cuba, which very few of them do. The word is not getting out much. Although within Cuba people are exhibiting their work, and you find it on the Internet often.

Any final thoughts?

Well, the show is intended to represent the work of photographers at three important periods in Cuba’s history. But I think that in the course of doing that, we’re giving people three very different views of Cuba, Havana in particular. And it’s showing how foreigners, particularly North Americans, have viewed the country, as well as how Cubans themselves were representing the history-making efforts going on around 1959. So it’s intended as a show about important photographers in Cuba and the U.S., but also to remind people of Cuba’s 20th-century history, to be a kind of history lesson as well.

"A Revolutionary Project: Cuba from Walker Evans to Now" is on view at The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through October 2.