ABSTRACT

Traces of the modern world were sometimes fugitive like the placards Evans photographed advertising Hollywood lms for a cinema nestled behind a traditional Havana colonnade (Figure 13.3). Modernity for Evans was found in a tangle of power lines overhead and massproduced media like Hollywood lms that now pervaded everyday life. They were the forms of a modern vernacular. The Havana that Evans summoned up proved what Berenice Abbott, his friend and fellow photographer of changing cities, said about the power of the camera to capture ‘what the past left you and what you are going to leave the future.’3 In his photographs for The Crime of Cuba Evans compressed Havana’s uneven modernities and overlapping temporalities into two-dimensional black and white spaces.