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Walker Evans
A tenant farmer's deprivation-lined face. Antebellum homes that have seen better days. The display windows of small-town main streets. The early subway commuter. Billboards. The images made by photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) are icons of national identity that have shaped Americans' views of themselves and directly influenced important currents of modern art. This major catalogue--published to accompany a retrospective exhibition originating at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveling to San Francisco and Houston--presents the full range of Evans's work, from his 1920s black-and-white street scenes of anonymous urban dwellers to the color photographs of signs and letter forms from his final years.
Soon after he returned from Paris to New York City in 1927, Evans began contributing to the development of American photography. He captured the substance of people and buildings with a spare elegance that is utterly unpretentious. His gaze is serious but often amused as well, direct yet never simple. During the 1930s, Evans traveled throughout the South to chronicle the effects of economic hardship. The time that he and writer James Agee spent with Alabama sharecropper families yielded an evocative, honest record of the Great Depression, which was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans then turned his lens back on New Yorkers, photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. He continued to influence American self-perception as staff photographer for Fortune from 1945 until he accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965.
Evans--who always chose art over what he criticized as artiness--wrote, in Photography (1969), "Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. This man is in effect a voyeur by nature; he is also reporter, tinkerer, and spy."
Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.
Soon after he returned from Paris to New York City in 1927, Evans began contributing to the development of American photography. He captured the substance of people and buildings with a spare elegance that is utterly unpretentious. His gaze is serious but often amused as well, direct yet never simple. During the 1930s, Evans traveled throughout the South to chronicle the effects of economic hardship. The time that he and writer James Agee spent with Alabama sharecropper families yielded an evocative, honest record of the Great Depression, which was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans then turned his lens back on New Yorkers, photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. He continued to influence American self-perception as staff photographer for Fortune from 1945 until he accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965.
Evans--who always chose art over what he criticized as artiness--wrote, in Photography (1969), "Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. This man is in effect a voyeur by nature; he is also reporter, tinkerer, and spy."
Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.
- GenresPhotography
336 pages, Paperback
First published January 31, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
March 11, 2016
More photography reading...
January 17, 2014
The text was boring and dated, of course the photographs were compelling.
April 19, 2017
The large format volume Walker Evans is probably the best book on the photographer's work now available. The copy I have is the hardcover edition originally published as a catalog to accompany an exhibit held at the Metropolitan Museum in 2000. What distinguishes this work from the many other studies of Evans' photos - I posted several months ago a review of The Hungry Eye - is not only the high quality of the reproductions but also the insights provided in the well written essays that accompany the plates.
2013 marked the 75th anniversary of Evans' iconic American Photos, and the Museum of Modern Art celebrated by recreating the original 1938 exhibit in its entirety. It was while attending that show this past summer that I began to renew my interest in Evans and to reexamine the influence his work had had on my own photography. His subway portraits taken with a hidden camera in 1938, as published in Many are Called, had a profound impact on the hidden camera photos I took in Times Square in the early 1990's.
In any retrospective of Evans' work, such as this book represents, one dismaying fact immediately becomes clear. All the photographer's major work was completed in the first half of his life. The images for American Photos as well as those in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were shot between 1936 - 1938. It was during this same brief period that Evans finished his work for the FSA and, with the assistance of Helen Levitt, created his subway portraits. At this time, Evans was only 35 years old. The remaining 37 years, until his death in 1975, were little more than a poignant postscript to his career. Most of the second half of his life was spent working for Time and Fortune magazines, whose middle-American and capitalist viewpoints - as promulgated by their publisher Henry Luce - had previously been anathema to Evans. I think it likely that this betrayal of his principles inhibited him greatly from creating authentic work on the level of that he had produced during the 1930's.
Evans is a difficult photographer to appreciate. A failed writer who turned to photography only after he was unable to produce fiction, he was an intellectual who was often quite snobbish. There is an irony to the fact that the man who produced so many great portraits of the poor, as in his work with writer James Agee, held himself so aloof from those about him. His very choice of a camera allowed him to maintain a distance from those he photographed. The view camera, his instrument of choice, effectively placed a wall between him and his subject. Not only does the image appear reversed and upside down when viewed on the ground glass, it is blocked entirely when a film holder is placed in the camera. Even when photographing the subway portraits with a handheld Contax camera, Evans shot "blind" by not framing his subject in the viewfinder before releasing the shutter. There is always a sense, when viewing Evans' photos, that one is looking at them from a remove. There is no intimacy in them, only a cold hard precision.
The plates in this book are all full page reproductions and are of excellent quality. Of the detailed essays, that entitled "The Cruel Radiance of What Is": Walker Evans and the South by Jeff L. Rosenheim, provides one of the best analyses of any photographer's work that I have come across. It gives the reader a new and deeper understanding of Evans' accomplishments.
2013 marked the 75th anniversary of Evans' iconic American Photos, and the Museum of Modern Art celebrated by recreating the original 1938 exhibit in its entirety. It was while attending that show this past summer that I began to renew my interest in Evans and to reexamine the influence his work had had on my own photography. His subway portraits taken with a hidden camera in 1938, as published in Many are Called, had a profound impact on the hidden camera photos I took in Times Square in the early 1990's.
In any retrospective of Evans' work, such as this book represents, one dismaying fact immediately becomes clear. All the photographer's major work was completed in the first half of his life. The images for American Photos as well as those in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men were shot between 1936 - 1938. It was during this same brief period that Evans finished his work for the FSA and, with the assistance of Helen Levitt, created his subway portraits. At this time, Evans was only 35 years old. The remaining 37 years, until his death in 1975, were little more than a poignant postscript to his career. Most of the second half of his life was spent working for Time and Fortune magazines, whose middle-American and capitalist viewpoints - as promulgated by their publisher Henry Luce - had previously been anathema to Evans. I think it likely that this betrayal of his principles inhibited him greatly from creating authentic work on the level of that he had produced during the 1930's.
Evans is a difficult photographer to appreciate. A failed writer who turned to photography only after he was unable to produce fiction, he was an intellectual who was often quite snobbish. There is an irony to the fact that the man who produced so many great portraits of the poor, as in his work with writer James Agee, held himself so aloof from those about him. His very choice of a camera allowed him to maintain a distance from those he photographed. The view camera, his instrument of choice, effectively placed a wall between him and his subject. Not only does the image appear reversed and upside down when viewed on the ground glass, it is blocked entirely when a film holder is placed in the camera. Even when photographing the subway portraits with a handheld Contax camera, Evans shot "blind" by not framing his subject in the viewfinder before releasing the shutter. There is always a sense, when viewing Evans' photos, that one is looking at them from a remove. There is no intimacy in them, only a cold hard precision.
The plates in this book are all full page reproductions and are of excellent quality. Of the detailed essays, that entitled "The Cruel Radiance of What Is": Walker Evans and the South by Jeff L. Rosenheim, provides one of the best analyses of any photographer's work that I have come across. It gives the reader a new and deeper understanding of Evans' accomplishments.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews