Walker Evans

by Clément Chéroux, Svetlana Alpers (Contributor), Anne Bertrand (Contributor)

Some of Walker Evans’ most iconic images of 20th-century American culture are showcased in this book celebrating his 50-year career. Walker Evans was one of the most important American photographers of the 20th century. His focus on everyday life in America, in both urban and rural settings, makes him also one of the most relatable. This retrospective volume traces Evans’ career through more than 300 images—from his first photographs of the late 1920s to his Polaroids of the 1970s. Organized thematically, the book examines topics such as Evans’ relationship with the impresario Lincoln Kirstein, his work in postcards and magazines, and his lifelong exploration of the American vernacular. In addition, this volume features items from the photographer’s own collection, including personal writings, signage, postcards, and other ephemera. Through these ancillary objects and a thorough overview of Evans’ career, readers will come away with a better understanding of a photographer whose iconic photographs remain timeless.

Genres: Photography, Art

320 pages, Hardcover

Published October 10, 2017

Reviews

[William West · Rating 4 out of 5]

For an artist whose work has contributed to the very meaning of "American" in modernity, Walker Evans creative inspiration was initially very European. As with countless other young people, he first decided to pursue the arts while living in Paris, a time he would continue to hold as the happiest in his life. Indeed, exhibit curator/ catalog editor Clement Cheroux informs us, Evans held his two greatest artistic influences to be the writings of Flaubert and Baudelaire. This struck me as strange when I first read it, but as I roamed the halls of this very large retrospective, it began to make sense.

Baudelaire is the ultimate writer-as-flaneur, and Flaubert had some of that to him as well. Evans decided to pursue art as he wandered the streets of Paris, happening upon things that caught his eye. What became known as Evans "documentary style"- the seemingly detached depiction of the transient American landscape and its denizens- was, perhaps, Evans's attempt to be a photographic flaneur in America. One of Evans's most prominent themes is methods of transport, particularly cars- the means by which one can wander the American heart-land and see.

Cheroux is, perhaps, a bit too proud of his thesis that Evans's was an aesthetic of the vernacular. In is commentary, Cheroux keeps pushing the phrase to mean more than it really seems to. It is obvious to anyone who has seen his photos that Evans was fascinated by signs and movie posters. If that is what is meant by an "aesthetic of the vernacular" then fine, but Evans fondness for such objects doesn't seem to me to call for such a label.

One is struck, however, by how much America was, for Evans, one big advertisement. Images of Broadway become blinking phantasmagorias. And with that word, I found myself comparing Evans with another famous admirer of Baudelaire who was a contemporary of Evans: the German-Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin. For both Evans and Benjamin early twentieth century capitalism had made the world a promise of- an allusion to- actual lived experience rather than an arena for that experience. Benjamin wrote of the mechanical reproduction of art, of imitations of imitations, and Evans was fond of taking photographs of photographs. Both were ambivalent about the phantasmagoria of modernity. Evans at times seems to be celebrating the world of advertisements, finding beauty in their fading image. Yet, he devoted whole cycles of photos to trash dumps and auto-cemeteries, the polluting waste of "progress". If Benjamin feared for the human and the work of art in an age of mechanistic control, he also thought that the angel of redemption, understood sometimes literally, sometimes metaphorically as the proletarian revolution, could arise from just this mechanization.

The whole "aesthetic of the vernacular" thesis strikes me as problematic, as well, because Evans was also an accomplished photographer of the human face. Cheroux maintains that because Evans's figures are, for the most part, anonymous, this makes them more "everyday" and "utilitarian" which struck me as creepy and elitist. Some of Evans's most famous figural photos were taken when he was working for the FDR administration during the Great Depression. Having recently seen a great exhibit of Dorothea Lange's work from the same era, it was interesting comparing the two. Compared to Lange's work, there was something artificial about Evans's portraits. He worked with his subjects and allowed them to decide how they wanted to pose. Lange was, in a way, more heartless. She didn't always get her subject's permission and her depictions were not always flattering. Yet, her images of the Depression are, for me, more powerfully a call to action. For Lange, art was a means of political activism. For Evans, politics was just another excuse to create art.