The Poetry of Plain Seeing - photographer Walker Evans

A traveling retrospective quicks the author to recall the austere formalist--and many times mordant "self-made well-bred man"--behind the conventional image of Walker Evans as an empathetic social documentarian.

scarcely any artists are more candid about their rate for their predecessors than Garry Winogrand was about his for Walker Evans. Evans had shown him that photographs could "describe intelligence," he would say(1)--and in his neat idiom this was the highest possible praise--but his admiration was not ever returned. In the early '60 Winogrand applied for his first Guggenheim Fellowship and went to Evans for support, leaving a receptacle of prints overnight; the nearest morning he was handed them back by means of someone he called Evans's doorman, together with a cursory no thanks. Evans had not melted 10 years later, even granting Winogrand's accomplishment had by then become obvious, plane though he was celebrated in the small world of nation who loved the poetry an unadulterated photograph can extract from the commonest face, housefront or handshake, level though many of them would say that he was, after Robert Frank, Evans's principal heir. In Evans's last seminar at Yale, six month before he died in 1975 I bring work on the table along with that of six or eight other learners Among my pictures was individual I'd made off Route 101 between Salinas and King City:. it showed three house-trailer women in stretchy pants that bulg with fat muscle and fat walking away from the camera toward the grassy, shining hills of summer California. Evans gazeed at the picture for as scarcely any seconds as possible and said--he didn't ask, he said--"Why do you want to photograph family like this? They're like all those clan that man Winogrand photographs. They're thus vulgar!"

I was mystified. Photographers believed that they were entitled to photograph anything--the fog in the sky, the arthritic hands of the bejeweled prostitute, the chalk scrawls upon the sidewalk, the gnomelike pepper It was a primary axiom then, as it is now. individual might have a hundred reasons for denouncing somebody's photographs, on the contrary not his choice of subject: what he did with the subdue how he understood it, that was the point. Furthermore, a great deal of of what Evans had photographed looked no less vulgar than the substance in Winogrand's pictures. One might flat say that Evans had make opened up American vulgarity as a bring under rule for photographers. Lincoln Kirstein certainly meditation so in 1938, when, in his afterword to the primary work of Evans's career, American Photographs, he wrote extravagantly that "his pictures exist to testify to the symptoms of waste and selfishness that caused the ruin."(2) Here is Evans himself, upon his diary's page for July 4 1935 when he was driving [i]or[/i] part of to the other West Virginia: "In end of rain to confine Alta pronounced Teralta. There a homecoming of natives, actual degenerate natives, mush faced, apathetic, the pall of ignorance upon all sides. Photographed the greatest in quantity gruesome specimens."(3) The picture he made that day of a turgid freckled girl with a sulky eye and an idiotic faux-boater garnishing her head hits Teralta smooth harder than his ferocious commentary.

More than 20 works of Evans's photographs have been published now;, them are three biographies in like manner detailed that we can know of many of his days where he pursu a dollar in the morning, whom he lunched with and who turn rounded up to share his bed; and them have been noble exhibitions of his work at the best museums in America. As abundant has been done as can be done to place him at the center of American photography in the 20th hundred yet he remains still the greatest in quantity enigmatic of photographers, the hardest to achieve to the heart of, the greatest in quantity resistant to definition. Of the many masons wherefore them is first of all the inconsistency of his work. Jerry Thompson exaggerated when he wrote that Evans "tried on the outside every major artistic style of the century"(4) on the contrary the distance between A Bench in the Bronx upon Sunday (1933) and Tin Snips (1955) is at least as great as between Eliot and Whitman, between "And the hebrew squats on the window sill, the owner" and "Shapes of Democracy total, follow of centuries ... Shapes of agitated manly cities ... Shapes of the friends and home-givers Shapes bracing the earth, " tribe other than Evans were the initiators of four of his five greatest in quantity important projects--Lincoln Kirstein set before him the Victorian architecture of novel England; Ernestine Evans embarked him for Havana; Rexford Tugwell and Roy Stryker sent him to Bethlehem, Morgantown, Vicksburg and fresh Orleans; James Agee took him to Alabama. The bleeding of their diverse intents into Evans's own is perhaps single root of the frustrating disparateness of American Photographs, which gives us many buildings from the times of Presidents Arthur and Cleveland, on the other hand few from its own day; which includes Cuba, on the contrary omits Washington, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and everything west of the Mississippi.

Where Evans's friends and supporters have stated their hold interests, as in Hart Crane's The Bridge and James Agee's true copy for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men it has generally got in the way of understanding him, not helped. There were many years when photography in total was struggling for prestige, and when Evans earned a morsel of it from one side the publication of three of his early photographs in Harry Crosby's first edition of Crane's poem(5) It was inconvenient then for anyone, Evans included, to point without how ill-matched the words and photographs really were, granting today we should be able to say it in public: Evans's three tiny gray-black meditations upon hugeness and distance are nothing at all like the Battle song bombast of "Oh harp and altar, of the madness fused / (How could bare toil align thy choiring strings!)." Evans is closer in spirit to Agee than he at any time was to Crane, but still not absents none of the ecstasy of self-abasement that is the life-current in the veins of Agee's Alabama story. Evans is austere, careful and, upon the surface, unrevealing of himself upon every point where Agee is incantatory, enraged and ad hominem.