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Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch
A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker EvansWalker 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.
- GenresPhotographyArt
518 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 20, 2020
9 people are currently reading
80 people want to read
About the author
Svetlana Alpers
24 books24 followersScholar 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
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
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 17, 2021
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.
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.
January 5, 2022
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.
February 20, 2022
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.
Read
May 22, 2024had some issues with the tone sometimes but I learned new things
February 2, 2025
3.5 stars. I'll maybe write a longer review in due course.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews