What do you think?
Rate this book
Walker Evans
In 1930 a disaffected young photographer in New York pointed his camera at two workers shoving a huge sign reading DAMAGED into a truck. With that image, Walker Evans gave birth to the quirky, edgy genre of street photography. Yes, this is the same Walker Evans famous for eye-level photographs of Alabama sharecroppers, rural churches and roadside signs. The special appeal of Walker Evans is that—in addition to nearly 200 classic photographs—it offers new images and fresh assessments of his work, based on diaries, letters, field notes and unpublished negatives acquired a decade ago by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The engagingly written essays by four specialists all bump up against the contradictory impulses of this meticulous, aloof yet curiously passionate artist. A self-described "gray man," he hated color photography. Yet the photographs from his final years--he died in 1975--include strikingly offbeat Polaroids of the glum or startled faces of friends and acquaintances. Four decades earlier, too inhibited to confront strangers directly, he hid a camera in his coat to capture the slack faces of subway riders. Despite the unadorned power of his images of people, Evans had a deeper connection to vernacular architecture and roadside signs. He photographed these everyday subjects straight on, at eye level, deliberately opting for the most deadpan approach. Yet the images are imbued with Evans' unique sensitivity to subtle visual rhythms. Influenced by Surrealism, he freely cropped photographs to shift the viewer's perspective. Despite his ardent scrutiny of the American scene in the 1930s, Evans stood apart from politics and disdained both sentimentality and social criticism. His omnivorous appetite for the culture of his time was tempered by the sober documentary influence of nineteenth century photographers Eugène Atget and Matthew Brady. For all its shrewd commentary, this beautifully produced book discusses Evans' life only insofar as it illuminates the story of the photographs. More detailed accounts are available in biographies by James R. Mellow and Belinda Rathbone. --Cathy Curtis
- GenresPhotography
Paperback
First published January 31, 2000
13 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
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