Walker Evans - Hardcover

Hambourg, Maria M

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691050783 ISBN 13: 9780691050782

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2000

Synopsis

A tenant farmer's deprivation-lined face. Antebellum homes that have seen better days. The display windows of small-town main streets. The early subway commuter. Billboards. The images made by photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) are icons of national identity that have shaped Americans' views of themselves and directly influenced important currents of modern art. This major catalogue--published to accompany a retrospective exhibition originating at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and traveling to San Francisco and Houston--presents the full range of Evans's work, from his 1920s black-and-white street scenes of anonymous urban dwellers to the color photographs of signs and letter forms from his final years.

Soon after he returned from Paris to New York City in 1927, Evans began contributing to the development of American photography. He captured the substance of people and buildings with a spare elegance that is utterly unpretentious. His gaze is serious but often amused as well, direct yet never simple. During the 1930s, Evans traveled throughout the South to chronicle the effects of economic hardship. The time that he and writer James Agee spent with Alabama sharecropper families yielded an evocative, honest record of the Great Depression, which was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans then turned his lens back on New Yorkers, photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat. He continued to influence American self-perception as staff photographer for Fortune from 1945 until he accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965.

Evans--who always chose art over what he criticized as artiness--wrote, in Photography (1969), "Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. This man is in effect a voyeur by nature; he is also reporter, tinkerer, and spy."

Although his work has received many awards, been enshrined in the best museums, and been exhibited on several continents, Evans's total corpus is only now being fully examined. This important book revises our appreciation of Evans by presenting previously unknown material in an accessible context. Essays by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Doug Eklund, and Mia Fineman offer novel insights into the sources and legacy of Evans's work. The result is a superb exploration of what was achieved by one of our finest, mostly deeply American artists.

About this title

Review:

In 1926 Walker Evans dropped out of Williams College and arrived in Paris to launch his career as a writer. Though his life there revolved around the renowned Shakespeare and Company bookstore, a mixture of introversion and disdain for American culture kept him at a remove from the now famous expatriate circle of the era: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and James Joyce. He spent most of his time abroad alone and picked up his camera from time to time to document his immediate world, making images of his boarding room and his own shadow against a wall. When he returned to the US, Evans began to dedicate more time to his hobby, and by the end of his long career had established himself as one of the most important modernist photographers. Walker Evans, the catalogue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's retrospective of Evans's work (exhibiting February to May 2000, then moving on to other venues), is proof that his choice to abandon writing for photography left the cultural world richer. It is also arguably the best book available on the photographer and his images.

The Metropolitan possesses the bulk of Evans's archive and its curators discovered hundreds of previously unknown negatives stored at the Library of Congress. The catalogue's introductory essays by such writers as Maria Morris Hambourg, head of photography for the Met, sketch the biographical details of Evans's life and explore his works in depth. But the real treat is to browse the nearly 200 plates. Evans's early work focused on New York City but he soon fanned out, photographing main drags and battered buildings in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. He also explored the people of Havana, Cuba and the rural American South in some of his best-known work. By the mid-1970s, Evans was working in colour, but his imagery remained consistent. Arriving at the close of this book, readers can only thank the fates that Evans gave up his ambitions as a writer to devote himself wholly to his "left-handed hobby" of photography. --Jordana Moskowitz

Review:

"A masterly catalog . . . [The curators] have contributed the book's six learned and lucid essays. . . . The reproductions show the range of Evan's work, while the essays provide context for his achievements. . . "--Rosemary Ranck, New York Times Book Review

"Walker Evans is stylishly written and a delight to read . . . [He] became the essential American photographer of his time: and this is his essential book."--Mark Haworth-Booth, Burlington Magazine

"[These] images have by now seeped so deeply into America's collective national unconscious that hardly anyone can visualize what the country looked like 75 years ago outside the context of Evans's iconic images."--Glenn McNatt, Baltimore Sun

"Evans captured the wounded, striving, uncertain soul of America in the 1930's, and set it down with one of the most detached mindful touches in photographic history."--Jerry Saltz, The Village Voice

"This remarkable catalogue of an exhibition now at the Museum of Art in New York City gives us a wonderfully condensed look at the scope of [Evans's] achievement."--Publishers Weekly

"A first-class catalog. . . . . The nearly 200 lushly reproduced black-and-white and color photographs prove . . . objectivity and a direct style should not be confused with lack of passion. The effort of photography, both physically and emotionally, is to compose poetry with images."--Roni Galgano, San Diego Union-Tribune

"Even in the presence of the deepest poverty, Evans' eye remained fixed on the kind of poetic perception that is the glory of his work."--Hilton Kramer, Art & Antiques

"A rock-solid work providing biographical, historical, and visual accounts of the artist's life and work . . . Careful reproduction of well-known black-and-white and little-known color photographs by Evans form the heart of this volume"--Library Journal

"This illuminating volume includes more than 175 of Evans' finest photographs. Essays by the authors draw on newly accessible diaries, papers, and negatives now at the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan that provide us with a Walker Evans that no one knew."--Bonnie Weller, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"All photographs capture light; Evans managed to seal and store it so securely that, like a day remembered as endless, it may never run out. . . .The crystalline rightness of his composition makes you think . . . of a guy going out on a road, like a hunter or salesman, and gazing at places until they bequeath the beauty of their natural form, as if it were hidden already, and needed only patience to flush it out."--Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0691050783
• ISBN 13: 9780691050782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 268