Eight Scalpels

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).

June 1935

A miners' settlement and a staff post at the RA

In 1935 Evans spends two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania; in June he accepts a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlays this temporary employment into a full-time position as an “information specialist” in the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) and from October 1935 on does photographic work for it, primarily in the Southern United States.

summer 1936

Hale County with James Agee, on assignment for Fortune

In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, Evans and the writer James Agee are sent by Fortune to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opts not to run.