Polaroids

by Walker Evans, Jeff L. Rosenheim

In 1973 Walker Evans began to work with the innovative Polaroid SX-70 camera and was given an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer. The virtues of this camera, introduced in 1972, perfectly fit Evans's search for a concise yet poetic vision of his world: its instant prints were for the infirm seventy-year-old photographer what scissors and cut paper were for the aging Matisse. The unique SX-70 prints are the artist's last photographs, the culmination of half a century of work in photography. With this new camera, Evans returned to some of his key motifs -signs, posters, and their ultimate reduction, the letter itself. "Nobody should touch a Polaroid until he's over sixty," Evans once said. It was only, he implied, after years of work and struggle and experimentation, years of developing one's judgment and vision, that the instrument could be pushed to its full, revelatory potential. Using the SX-70, and leaving aside the intricacies of photographic technique, Evans stripped photography to its bare essentials: seeing and choosing. The 300 images in this book, almost all of them unpublished, were selected from a total of approximately 2500 Polaroids that Evans left behind when he died in 1975. The size of the book and the page design follow a sample page created by Evans.
Edited by Jeff L. Rosenheim.

Hardcover, 8 x 10 inches, 265 color illustrations.

Genres: Photography

336 pages, Hardcover

First published October 15, 2001

About the author

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans's work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".

Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.

In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame

Reviews

[Paul H. · Rating 4 out of 5]

So surreal lol. Evans using Polaroids is something like Andy Warhol deciding to try classical landscape painting in his late fifties; somehow they would still be Warhols, but it's just the most cognitively dissonant thing ever.

[Neo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful. That's it.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful book. Fascinating to see Walker Evans' last body of work and how his vision translated into a more (relatively) modern format than his classic Depression-era black and whites. He was a great photographer to the end.