Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch

by Svetlana Alpers

A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans



Walker Evans (1903-75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans's work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle.

Alpers demonstrates that Evans's practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans's dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists--from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner--underscoring how Evans's travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style.

A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world--to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.

Genres: Photography, Art

416 pages, Hardcover

Published October 20, 2020

About the author

Scholar of Dutch baroque art; professor of History of Art, UC Berkeley,1962-1994; exponent of the "new art history."

Born Sventlana Leontief, she graduated from Radcliffe College with a B.A. in 1957. She married the following year, assuming her husband's surname of Alpers. She continued graduate work in art history at Harvard University publishin an article on Vasari's verbal descriptions of art (ekphraseis) in 1960 in the Journal of the Warburg and Coutauld Institutes, which announced her innovative approach to art history. Alpers accepted a teaching position as an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962 while working on her dissertation. She graduated from Harvard in 1965, writing her thesis under Seymour Slive on the Peter Paul Rubens cycle Torre de la Parada. Her work in Rubens' archives brought her to the attention of Roger d'Hulst, who suggested she turn her dissertation into a volume for the catalogue raissoné on Rubens. She rose to the rank of Professor at Berkeley. In 1971 she was appointed to the Board of Directors of the College Art Associate (remained until 1976). That same year here volume for the Rubens catalogue raissoné, The Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, number nine, was published.

In 1977 an important methodological article by Alpers appeared in Daedalus examining progressive scholarship in art history in contrast with earlier scholarship. During the academic year 1979-80 she was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1983, Alpers co-founded the progressive interdisciplinary journal Representations, publishing the article, "Interpretation without Representation, or, The Viewing of Las Meninas," in the first issue. That year, too, she published the first of her ground-breaking works in art history, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century. The book's central thesis focused on the the immediacy and simplicity of Dutch painting and the Dutch preoccupation with the description of interiors and domestic scenes, contrasting it with narrative Italian painting. Iconographical approaches to baroque art, she wrote, such as those practiced by Erwin Panofsky and others, were insufficient to understand Dutch imagery. Her book likewise criticized mainstream Dutch scholarship and its reliance on emblems and emblemata books explain Netherlandish still life paining. The Art of Describing was well received, reviewers hailing Alper's mastery of topics as diverse as optics and perspective theory. Critics, however, accused her of selective use of evidence, drawing only from paintings and texts which supported her theories.

In 1988, during the era of shocking reattributions of many works of Rembrandt by the Rembrandt Research Project, Alpers published a monograph on the artist, Rembrandt's Enterprise: The Studio and the Market The book examined Rembrandt's market strategies and his modeling his art to appeal to a Dutch consumer base. Her use of economic theory and a concerted avoidance of visual criteria again upset traditionalists in the art world.

Alpers co-wrote a book with fellow Berkeley art historian Michael Baxandall in 1994, Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. She was named Professor Emerita from Berkeley in 1994. The following year she returned to the art of the low countries with her Making of Rubens. The book looked at Rubens' politics, his later critical reception in France, and theorized specific meaning in the recurring Silenus figures of his later work.

Reaction to Alpers was summed up by Walter Liedtke. In an article on American historians of Dutch art, he characterized her work as containing "whole exclusions" of art that did not fit her thesis--such as the Utrecht school--a "typical exercise in American taste dressed up (with some French motifs) as a new analysis of Dutch Art." However, her work Rembrandt's Enterprise was included among the 169 major writings of art history in the 2010 Hauptwerke der Kunstgeschicht

Reviews

[Davy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, why can't there be more works of criticism like this? Where the concept is born, not of a desire to impress or show off, but of genuine curiosity and a desire to understand. Where the structure is not built of labyrinthine sentences and convoluted arguments, but the simple language you use when you actually want to share an insight with someone, and have them grasp it. Numerous times throughout this text, Alpers begins a new subject with a question. She'll ask it without already knowing the answer, and you can sense her eagerness -- it is contagious -- to dig in and see what she can find. What was it about Evans and pictures of wagons? "Let us read Evans on wagons and find out." The sentence in the book has no exclamation point, but you put one there when you read it.

The book is just so giving, so encouraging, so authentically enthusiastic. It makes you wonder if most critics really want to be understood, because surely if they did, they would write more like Alpers? Here's another bit, from the introduction: "I hope that those who don't know Evans will discover his greatness." She's not just saying that! That hope is there on every page and it makes such a profound difference to the reader: "Yes! I want to discover greatness! Show me!" And she does.

And from the opening of Chapter 2: "Now let us look at him actually at work . . . Can we catch him in the act of making?" The tug you feel is the same you felt during interactive story time when you were 4 years old -- it is the momentum of discovery, a fine thing for an art critic to undertake, though few seldom bother with it.

Happily, Alpers -- whose specialty is European painting -- brings a fresh perspective and is able to make good on her promises. Her insights and conclusions are carefully constructed, always sturdy, and the light bulbs pop on ten to a page. I am not a Walker Evans obsessive, though I love much of his work. The thing is, he's the Babe Ruth of American photography, the Bruce Lee, the JFK -- there's just so much more writing on him than anyone else. So to read about photography, often you find yourself reading about Walker Evans. Which is fine. It is especially fine if the book is as good as this. Highly recommended for anyone interested in this photographer, or photography in general, or, indeed, anyone interested in the act of writing about art, full stop. I'm not sure I've ever seen it done better.

[Stan · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you're a fan of Evans and know his work them this offers some interesting insights into his work and life. It's not a hard read and a third of the book are Evans images.

[Jonathan Walker · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an odd book, which is based on a particular interpretive gambit: the author confesses she knows little about photography, as an art history professor who is an expert in painting, and so she is constantly surprised or puzzled by elementary aspects of Evans’s practice which are fairly typical rather than unique to him. While this can produce a useful defamiliarizing effect, it also results in misunderstandings and errors.

Let me begin with a fundamental one. I’m what might be termed a serious amateur photographer: I’m mainly a creative writer, but I have published photography as well. My practice is typical in that I might take a hundred frames to get one I like. Admittedly my shooting ratio has gone up with the change to digital, and when I used to shoot large-format on film, I’d spend a lot more time on each individual exposure and shoot far less. Still, it is fundamental to how photography works that you try things out and end up with: a lot of garbage that obviously doesn’t work or is no interest, a small proportion of frames selected as possible keepers, and an even smaller selection of actual keepers. Sometimes with the benefit of time passed images get promoted from the garbage pile to the possibles pile; or the possibles pile to the keepers. Other times individual images get demoted. Sometimes this process becomes integral to the composition of a larger body of work, like the many iterations of Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency.

Alpers doesn’t seem to understand how this works. She’s frozen by the idea of a huge number of possible images with no obvious way (for her) to distinguish between them. She’s misled by the fact that Evans sometimes used variant negatives or variant croppings of the same negatives into thinking that everything in his archive had the same valence for him. Admittedly with a photographer like Evans, there’s an economic imperative for new publications to draw on unexplored parts of his archive, and since he’s a supremely talented photographer of great historical interest, these previously neglected images are often worth seeing, especially since they may serve to illuminate how he zeroed in on the keepers, but there’s no reason to believe Evans considered any of them as of equal to the images he selected for publication or exhibition. And when there were different selections over time, they didn’t come randomly from his entire archive, but from a smaller subset of possibles preserved as such over time. I’m confident in asserting this because it’s how every single photographer of merit has always worked.

There’s a very large selection of Evans images in a portfolio at the beginning of this book that illustrates this point, since it contains numerous images I’ve never seen before, and in almost every case, it’s obvious why I’ve never seen them, because they’re inferior to the iconic images. But Alpers apparently can’t see this, and in fact lavishes a great deal of attention on some of these inferior images. Still, the portfolio is one of the reasons to buy the book for Evans obsessives like me, even if the print quality is rather poor: it’s done with black ink only, and the images are often too dark.

I might expand this critique by reference to some specific phrasing, just sticking to the first few pages:

p. 4 [of the large 8x10 view camera that Evans often used in the 30s] 'It is a cumbersome instrument to use, but one that gave him the details and allowed for the straight-on view of the subject he preferred. It allowed him also to view his subject while photographing …'

Well, an 8x10 camera certainly does yield detailed negatives, but what does it mean to say it ‘allowed for the straight-on view of the subject’? Any camera allows for a ‘straight-on view’. It depends how you position it in relation to the subject. Perhaps the allusion is to the fact that a view camera allows for perspective correction (i.e. it allows you to straighten converging lines when composing the image), but this statement still feels very fuzzy. And while the screen on this camera does allow you to see what the lens is seeing while framing the image, it precisely does not allow you to see it at the moment you take the photograph, when the dark slide with the film is inserted and blocks the view.

pp. 6–7: 'He came to create the flattened effect he preferred by using a triple convertible lens (great distance made close) with his 8x10 camera.'

While this is not incorrect insofar as the general point being made, the ‘triple convertible lens’ is simply a peculiar instance of a larger category: what Alpers is actually talking about here is the effect of using a telephoto lens, a very general aspect of photographic optics/aesthetics, not some unique Evans idiosyncracy. And in fact the effect is really produced by the subject-to-camera distance: the telephoto lens is just how you frame a distant subject more tightly. Moreover, while it’s true that this compositional effect is a common element of many of Evans’s iconic images, he also shot plenty of images closer in on wider lenses, as one often has to do with architectural subjects. The 'triple convertible lens' actually permits this very possibility, since 'convertible' means it could be used as either a telephoto or a wider lens.

Alpers then discusses an example of what she terms as this ‘8x10 distance’ (p. 9), but her illustration is an image of an anonymous woman on a street, made from a 35mm negative, very obviously shot handheld, and likely on a 50mm lens, which technically is a very short telephoto, but is usually thought of as a ‘normal’ lens, neither telephoto nor wide-angle. She says, ‘The 8x10 distance he kept from the person viewed functioned as an equalizer, and it is in place no matter which camera he chooses to use.’

If we take this to mean that Evans maintains an emotional distance in all his photographs, then it’s accurate enough: this is one of the distinguishing features of his style. But then why bring ‘8x10’ into it? The techniques and aesthetics of handheld 35mm street photography are radically different from those of static 8x10 imagery. (This image was also likely shot on a rangefinder, with a quite different kind of viewfinder to an 8x10 view camera. This is a minor point, but I mention it because Alpers stressed the 8x10 viewfinder as important a few pages earlier.)

What this discussion misses is precisely Evans’s insistence, in American Photographs and his practice as a whole, on mixing images made using different photographic formats with widely different techniques, which is unusual, and is one index of his greatness.

There are three negatives in which the anonymous woman appears. Alpers says, to expand her initial argument (p. 8):

'We have been looking at Girl in Fulton Street as Evans’s chosen image. But several versions of it exist. Evans was at ease exhibiting and publishing different ones at different times. The Girl in Fulton Street he published in American Photographs is a slightly different image from the one he put up on the wall for the original American Photographs exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1938. (The Getty Museum, which lists all the images of every Evans photo in the collection, refers to them as variants.) I want to stress the oddity of this. We think of certain photographic images as iconic—Stieglitz’s Steerage, for example, or Blind Woman by Paul Strand (fig. 19), much admired by Evans. But Evans did not work that way. He was accepting of multiple versions of his images without, and this is important, entertaining the subversive notion of multiplicity (think of Sherrie Levine).'

Again, yes, the contrast with Stieglitz and Strand is instructive, but the ‘variants’ of Girl in Fulton Street, as far as I can tell, all come from the same negative (which is cropped in part to disguise a technical flaw at its edges), so the Getty’s description seems accurate. There’s variation, but it’s within precise limits, most of which were determined early on in the editing process. (Sometimes Evans did use different negatives, e.g. of his portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, but in these cases, it's precisely because the differences are pretty small.)

All this might seem like pedantry, especially to non-photographers for whom my technical descriptions won’t mean much – but this persistent inexactitude throughout a book from a professional art critic drives me crazy.

Even so, this is a very readable book, which displays a genuine curiosity about and interest in Evan's work, and the portfolio also makes it worth a look.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wanted to love this, and I did...for the first 2/3s. Then something got to me. There is a way in which she ignored too much of the cool scholarship on the documentary. And it ended up feeling a bit circular in its argumentation. Not in love with his treatment of women, nor her explanations for it. But a rich book, that I learned much from, particularly her challenging of Evans and nostalgia, allotting Evans a strong historical sense of how things will look in the future. So not the trace in the image, but the trace already in the thing, that then becomes a photographic trace. Liked her ideas on Evans as collector as well.

[Sam]

had some issues with the tone sometimes but I learned new things

[Rob GQ · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.75