Posed Portraits, New York

1927–1929

A Wall Street clerk and his New York friends

From 1927 to 1929 Evans is a clerk for a stockbroker firm on Wall Street; among his friends in New York's literary and art crowd are John Cheever, Hart Crane and Lincoln Kirstein.

1930

Three photographs in Hart Crane's “The Bridge”

Three of Evans's photographs, of the Brooklyn Bridge, are published in Hart Crane's poetry book “The Bridge”.

May – June 1933

An assignment in Cuba

In May and June 1933 Evans takes photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals' “The Crime of Cuba”, a “strident account” of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He documents street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes; 31 of his photographs will appear in Beals' book.

May – June 1933

Drinking with Hemingway in Cuba

In Cuba Evans drinks nightly with Ernest Hemingway, who lends him money to extend his two-week stay by an additional week. Fearing that his photographs might be deemed critical of the government and confiscated, he leaves 46 prints with Hemingway, and helps him acquire photos from newspaper archives documenting the political violence Hemingway describes in “To Have and Have Not” (1937).