Scavenging the landscape: Walker Evans and American life

INTRODUCTION

The Great American Depression, spanning the 1930 inscribed into the agriculture a psychic crisis. Faith in industrial ingenuity, heralded as "progressive," came unhinged. through 1933, four years after the stock market crash, individual quarter of the work force was unemployed(1) Into this dilemma came a multitude of photographic throw outs the most famous of which were sponsored by dint of the federal government in the form of agencies that provided relief to farmers, the unemploy and others. The greatest in quantity completely realized project was the documentation of conditions faced by means of displaced farmers, recorded by the Historic Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The socially-oriented photographic volume made its appearance, as did the photographic magazine, best exemplified by means of Life in 1936. Many of the best known American photographers came to prominence during the Depression, including Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Margaret Bourke-White. Of all the photographers from that era, individual represented the quintessential photographic turn of expression of the Depression while remaining an elusive figure in photographic history: Walker Evans (1903-1975)

From the vantage point of 1995 Evans's documentation of the Depression era is axiomatic. His photographs are ubiquitous, the couple in print and in collections including the United States Library of Congres which houses his FSA photographs. Surprisingly, until now a full-length biography of Evans has at no time been undertaken, although his life and photographs have occupied distinguished photographic and cultural historians including John Szarkowski, William Stott, Alan Trachtenberg, and greatest in quantity recently, Jean-Francois Chevrier.(2) The greatest in quantity elusive of the Depression-era photographers, Evans's personality and rule of working set him apart from his contemporaries, his talent and taste emanating from a literary rather than a visual tradition.

The year 1995 marked the publication of sum of two units new studies examining Evans's life and work. The first, Walker Evans: A Biography, by dint of independent photo historian and curator Belinda Rathbone, is written as a general interest biography. The volume the first full-length biography upon Evans, exhumes the private aspects of the artist's life in an attempt to understand his work. Citing the difficulty that prior would-be biographers meetinged in Evans's previously unsettled estate - newly settled and currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in novel York City - Rathbone's volume makes use of a entertainer of personal documents. As the daughter of Perry Rathbone, the former director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the author was fortunate to have known Evans. Building on her early impressions of the artist - whom the author characterizes as eccentric and unconventional - she exhausted five years tracking down and gathering personal reminiscences from more than 100 of Evans's closest friends and associates. These testimonies form the basis of her understanding of Evans's character.

The next to the first book, a 400-page catalog, Walker Evans: The J Paul Getty Museum Collection, written and compiled by the agency of Judith Keller, the museum's associate curator of photography, provides an exhaustive analysis of the museum's Evans collection. The collection is broad in design and Keller's approach considers the photographs within the socio-cultural and aesthetic discourses spanning Evans's 50-year career. abundant of the work came from photography collector Arnold Crane who purchased above 1000 archival prints from Evans in the 1960 and 1970 (an fact documented by Rathbone). Keller organized the collection chronologically into 10 chapters, tracing Evans's lock opener photographic assignments, each section rich with cultural significance and aesthetic analysis. Keller's research reveals continuity in the work: completely through his career, Evans pursued particular bring under rule matter, "signage, and other fix objects, portraits and architecture,"(3) (although this was not what he photographed exclusively). by dint of basing her analysis on the photographs, Keller allows the images to dictate the character of the research Although little of Evans's private life is discussed, Keller pay backs Evans's practice within the changing social landscape.

Each author approaches Evans differently - from the intimate remembrances in Rathbone, to historical evidence in Keller Rathbone is determined to use Evans's personal behavior to illuminate his artwork. She writes, "It was time for a full-scale biography, to diocese the whole man in relation to the shape of his life, the balance of his friendships, his manner of working, the external realitys he admired and collected, his haunts and place of abodes - in short, the filled range of his associations."(4) The central assumption in Walker Evans: A Biography is that the artist was a "genius," and by the agency of delving closely into the minutia of his life, individual can comprehend what made Evans "great." Critical studies in art and tillage reveal deeply held biases in terminuss such as "genius." Genius is a historical raise employed to promote a particular aesthetic and ideology above others, whereas Rathbone conceives of genius as transcending historical (material) conditions. The genius of the work, she implies, will be throw backed in the person. Keller, by conversion locates Evans's personality in the photographs themselves. Each work then, represents two distinct approaches to biographical research Taken together, the integrity of the artist as fix in Keller, and the shortcomings of the someone as found in Rathbone, help the reader locate Evans's place in photographic history.