Walker Evans Pa

by P Hist

Walker Evans (1903-1975) ranks with Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen and Paul Strand as one of America's greatest photographers. When originally published in 1994, Walker The Hungry Eye was the first book to survey every significant aspect of the artist's oeuvre. This reduced-format version, identical in content to the previous volume, includes 300 beautiful duotone photographs. Evans was largely self-educated and began photographing regularly in 1927, using a small hand-held camera. He specialized in the life of the street - carefully observed views of American architecture, the roadside, and the people who lived in the nation's villages, towns and cities. Beginning with Evans's early abstractions, continuing through his three-year involvement with the Farm Security Administration and his breakthrough exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and concluding with the artist's experimentation with colour late in his life, Walker The Hungry Eye remains the most complete and authoritative view of this American photographic master.

Genres: Photography, Nonfiction, Reference, Art

96 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1971

Reviews

[Juan Peirano · Rating 2 out of 5]

Una representación un poco simple sobre parte de la obra del maestro

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 stars; Exploring the classics in photography; feast your eyes on these works of art; not all masterpieces but plenty to go around to get you inspired. Many of these collections are long out of print; check out the Internet Archive (https://archive.org); many of the timeless classics are made freely available or after signing up, free to (digitally) borrow.

[Margot Note]

"Evans's strength lay in accepting and mastering the duality of the photographic document, which constantly swivels between two points, serving both as an imprint of reality that is an inevitable project of the technological process, and as an object of aesthetic contemplation, born of the photographer's artistic impulse. Evans acknowledges this ambiguity in what he himself calls his 'documentary style', which he elaborates as follows: 'The real thing that I'm talking about has purity and a certain severity, rigor, or simplicity, directness, clarity, and it is without artistic pretension in a self-conscious sense of the word.'"

[Shannon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Purchased from London Portrait Gallery, summer 2010. Walker Evans is brilliant. The biography at the beginning of the book is incredibly concise and provides interesting details despite its brevity.