Ernest Hemingway y Carol Martine. La Habana. Cuba. 1956.

Individual vintage gelatin silver print in black and white: Measurements: 13 x 18.1 cm / 5.11 x 7.12 in. On the back a wet blue stamp indicates in French: "Martine Carol chez Hemingway-La Havane" and below, typewritten and in Spanish: "Martine Carol with the writer Hemingway during his visit to Havana”. Some instructions in graphite pencil indicate that the photograph served as a press illustration for an article dedicated to the cinematographic diva.

The interesting intimate portrait was made towards the end of June 1956, when the French actress Martine Carol (1920-1967) visited Havana accompanied by her husband, the director Christian Jacques. It was on the occasion of an important festival dedicated to French cinema.

On that occasion the spoiled girl of the French cinema of the '50s visited the mythical American writer and journalist Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) at his residence in "La Vigía". With professional skill, the photojournalist who accompanied her captured this interesting scene, where both gaze absorbed in an illustrated book with photographs and surrounded by the profuse library of that famous adventurer. Other takes are known about this meeting; in one of them Hemingway carries two of his famous shotguns, a favorite weapon with which he committed suicide on July 2, 1961 after a hectic and turbulent life.

Hemingway lived in the “La Vigía” farm from mid-1939 to 1960. It was in that spacious tropical residence -now converted into a museum dedicated to his memory-, where he wrote some of his memorable books, such as "By whom they fold the bells "on the drama of the Spanish civil war, and" The old man and the sea", based on a story of fishermen from the nearby town of Cojimar and which won him the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1953 and the following year the Nobel Prize for his complete work. Both works were later turned into the cinema.

By Abel Alexander

President of the Ibero-American Society for the History of Photography