overleaf: Interior Detail of Portuguese House Truro, Massachusetts, 1930
Walker Evans The Hungry Eye Gilles Mora and John T. Hill
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers
Translated from the French by Jacqueline Taylor Editor, English-language edition: Robert Morton
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Walker Evans: the hungry eye / by Gilles Mora and John T. Hill p. cm. Introduction in French. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8109-3259-8 1. Photography, Artistic. 2. Travel photography. 3. Evans, Walker, 1903–1975. 4. Photographers — United States — Biography. I. Title. TR654.M63484 1993 779’.092 — dc20 93 – 16399 CIP
Photographs copyright © 1993 Estate of Walker Evans Foreword copyright © 1993 John T. Hill Text copyright © 1993 Gilles Mora English translation copyright © 1993 Harry N. Abrams, Inc. and Thames and Hudson, Ltd.
Published in 1993 by Harry N. Abrams, Incorporated, New York A Times Mirror Company All rights reserved. No part of the contents of this book may be reproduced without the written permission of the publisher.
Book design: Judy Kohn, Kohn Cruikshank Inc, Boston Printed and bound in Italy
Contents
7
Foreword by John T. Hill
9
Introduction by Gilles Mora
1927–32
14 16 28 34 54
Introduction Early Abstractions Brooklyn Bridge New York Streets Victorian Architecture
1932–35
68 70 78 96 102 122
Introduction Tahiti Havana African Sculpture The Deep South Antebellum Architecture
1935–38
132 134 160 198
Introduction The Farm Security Administration American Photographs Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
1938–45
218 220 238 250
Introduction The Subway Florida: The Mangrove Coast Bridgeport: The War Factories
1945–65
258 260 270 282 290 296 300
Introduction Labor Anonymous Chicago: A Camera Exploration California Beaches Views from the Train The Beauty of the Common Tool Aboard the Liberté
1927–75
304 306 320 332 336
Introduction Signs and Graffiti Postcards Trash Color
352 354 358 359 362
Acknowledgments Annotations Chronology Exhibitions Bibliography
Foreword
Walker Evans’ career is sufficiently complex and diverse that no single volume can presume to be fully definitive. In making this book, however, we attempt to trace the evolution of themes and processes that form a constant thread through his work. Building on previous publications that have surveyed his photographs, we have selected projects and images to illustrate this. For Evans, photography was an infinitely malleable medium, one meant to be hammered to fit his own purposes. For him, there were no canons or sacrosanct methods. The camera was simply a convenient mechanism for collecting ideas, icons, and anecdotes. Like a master carpenter selecting the right tool, Evans moved easily from one photographic format to another, choosing whichever seemed to suit the job at hand. The thought of manufacturing high art with the camera was remote for Evans. He was devoted to revealing the commonplace in a brutally direct and artless way. If there was the slightest extraneous fat of information left on a negative, no matter how graceful, he would relentlessly cut away to the bone. His clarity of purpose elevates the meaning of the mundane subject to a higher level. Evans was one of the first photographers to grasp the potential of the book as an ideal vehicle for directing his audience. In his several books he explored the many possibilities of sequence, building phrases and stanzas from groups of pictures. By controlling the context he could alter the meaning of individual images and expand his vocabulary. In examining the contact sheets from which Evans edited his images, one is repeatedly struck by his ability to extract just the right fragment from the one frame that fits perfectly into a sequence. Although certain of his individual images have become landmarks in the history of photography, it is important to see how these photographs fit into the sequences that he fashioned for his two greatest volumes, American Photographs and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Walker Evans was a man with an innate sense of wit, which is not to be confused with comedy or humor. A keen understanding of irony and satire was a constant in his life and in his work. No matter how profound a subject might be, it was never approached under a burden of plodding piety: the pursuit, however earnest, was always tempered with visual and verbal playfulness. Wit, for Evans, could be a solidly built woman wearing a zebra-patterned blouse standing in the striped doorway of a barber shop. Wit could be a grossly scaled sign spelling “damaged” being hoisted onto truck. Wit could be attempting to capture and fix an evocative moment with a 35mm camera held out the window of a moving car. Wit was the nonchalance of denouncing the impossible vulgarity of color photography while making color photographs. Wit was the irony of taking up the Polaroid sx-70 camera as a tool for serious work. Perhaps the ultimate demonstration of Evans’ wit was his delight in passing himself off as a documentary photographer, nay, even a photojournalist, and while enjoying this charade producing some of the most profoundly lyrical images of our century. John T. Hill
left: Self-portrait 1929 right: Walker Evans. Photograph by Jerry Thompson 1973
I go to the street for the education of my eye and for the sustenance that the eye needs —the hungry eye, and my eye is hungry. W.E.
Introduction
The first things that interest us about photographers are the photographic problems that their work presents, resolves, and reformulates, and by which the photographers are sometimes defeated. Other questions belong to biography. In his lifetime Walker Evans rejected the label of “fine art photographer” as it was defined in certain circles. But, as with one of his important models, the French photographer Eugene Atget, he demonstrated ability of such a high order that the label “artist” came to be applied to both of them. This fine instance of aesthetic ambiguity serves the biographer and the critic equally well since it gives both of them plenty to work on. The idea behind this book has been to put together a collection of Evans’ work that will reveal its full complexity. It is, of course, not the first retrospective, and it takes account of publications already available. Its scope, however, is more systematic. Among earlier books is John Szarkowski’s excellent catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art, published in 1971. In addition to Walker Evans at Work, there was also First and Last, now out of print; the catalogue of Evans’ work for the Farm Security Administration published by Da Capo Press in 1973; successive and regular reprints in several languages of the
9
1. For all these, see bibliography.
10
2. John Szarkowski, Walker Evans, cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1971).
3. Walker Evans, “The Reappearance of Photography,” Hound & Horn, Vol.– 5, October– December 1931, 125–28. Evans writes of Atget’s project to make a photographic archive of society by selection, as “a truly clinical process.”
celebrated Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; and above all, under the aegis of the Museum of Modern Art, American Photographs. (Reproduced here for the first time are the entire contents of the 1938 exhibition which the book accompanied.) Lastly, in 1989, a seminal work of Evans’ appeared, Havana 1933, little known until then. Other publications, more modest but just as useful, preceded or followed those mentioned above.1 Twenty years after his death it seems that Evans’ work was published much more than it was exhibited; indeed, he himself considered photography a medium better suited to printed works than the walls of an art gallery. Walker Evans fascinates. His work seems to have followed an upward curve in the influence it has exercised, a slow ripening that makes its importance more urgent and more illuminating. Whereas Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, and Paul Strand—all Evans’ equals in terms of modernity—enjoyed undisputed recognition and understanding during their lifetimes, Walker Evans had to wait until near the end of his life before his greatness began to be fully appreciated. The scope of his work went far beyond the documentary tradition, within which he had generally been assumed to confine himself. Even in 1971, while directing the last great retrospective of Evans’ life at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski in his introductory essay passed a judgment on the contents of the work, whose restrictive character, clearly visible today, could easily be interpreted as the opposite: “Nonetheless Evans’ work is rooted in the photography of the earlier past and constitutes a reaffirmation of what has been photography’s central sense of purpose and aesthetic: the precise and lucid description of significant fact.” 2 And while it may be true, the statement does not go far enough, since it ignores the direction in which Walker Evans opened up photography, taking it to the far side of modernity. The Hungry Eye intends to contribute to this broader understanding of his work by showing another Evans, a man who was one of the most intellectually stimulating practitioners of modern photography. In order to give some account of the richness of this work we have tried to make it more visible by giving it a structure, using the same method that Evans had in mind when he spoke of “the photographic editing of society.” 3 We have presented his work according to photographic projects, in chronological order. This arrangement shows more clearly what a
tireless experimenter Evans was. While this approach does not neglect what might be called the “canonical” periods of his creativity—the thirties—it gives a more proper prominence to the other projects and distinguishes other fields of interest that now seem essential and toward which Evans’ research was taking him: the deconstruction of the photographic portrait; the use of the random as a creative principle; reflections on the appropriation of the consumer image; seriality and archive-making in the photographic process; the role of the vernacular object, its photographic use and its collection; the ambiguity in photography of art and document, and the part it plays in the media. Finally, through all these matters, there is Evans’ perennial confrontation with the question of anonymity. It is an idea that runs as a continuous thread through his work, a ruthlessly exacting condition of what he glimpsed as the future of photography, freed from the aesthetic of a subject. Evans was the first to understand this, before Pop Art, the New Realists, Ed Ruscha, the Bechers, William Christenberry, Lewis Baltz, and New Topography. He reflected on the American landscape, its organization and its signs; and on the city, with its emblematic structuring of architecture and environment, without ignoring its culture. The culture he examined, of course, was American, drawn to the real and the pragmatic, but one that he could tackle head-on. He was armed with the tools of a European intellectualism—in literature most of all—that was more concerned with the aesthetic of the real. Evans’ strength lies in this cross-fertilization, in this intellectual and psychological complexity, which led him always to stand apart from his projects, and from his contemporaries.
11
Europe 1926–1927
12 4. Garry Winogrand, “A Photographer Looks at Walker Evans,” in The Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Project (Austin, Texas: University of Texas, 1974).
5. Jean-François Chevrier, Allan Sekula, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, in Walker Evans & Dan Graham, exhibition catalog (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991).
6. Walker Evans, interview with Paul Cummings, 13 October 1971. Estate of Walker Evans. “In a general way, I am a literary man.”
Very early on Evans took his stand in a different mental and aesthetic sphere than Alfred Stieglitz, while remaining perfectly aware of the cultural and historic particularities of his time. This enabled him more effectively to take account of and make use of them. Like Berenice Abbott, Ralph Steiner, or Ben Shahn he placed himself within the documentary context. Evans, however, went straight to a different course of action, saw further ahead. Behind the much-praised transparency of his images there is no photographic innocence, no political naiveté: we shall see how much he hated that. Between Evans and the influential photographers who came after him—Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus— there seems to be a direct link, an understanding of the same problems. Garry Winogrand, when he came to the discovery of Evans’ work, spoke of it in terms of his own work, which rebounds to destroy the documentary illusion that people have persisted in seeing in Evans’ photography. (“The photographs [of Evans] are about what is photographed, and how what is photographed is changed by being photographed, and how things exist in photographs.”)4 In 1963 Andy Warhol took a series of photographs in tribute to Robert Rauschenberg, but referring explicitly to Evans he gave it the title of the latter’s most famous work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Since the sixties many conceptual artists, Dan Graham for one, and Sherrie Levine, have realized Evans’ importance for their own work.5 It is impossible not to see in a filmmaker such as the German Wim Wenders the influence of Evans in the urban themes of films such as Alice in the Cities or Wings of Desire, and in his distant, ironic way of framing reality. The most remarkable thing about Evans was certainly the complexity and intelligence that allowed him, very gently and without seeming to do anything, to “wrong-foot” all the photographic attitudes of his time. A photographer, he referred constantly to literature, as his friend Lincoln Kirstein emphasized in his afterword to American Photographs. Evans repeated time and again, “I am a man of literature.” 6 His allusions to literature—Flaubert, Baudelaire, Proust, Henry James, Hemingway, and above all James Joyce—in the photographic context of the mid-twentieth century are significant. He is on the side of those who modify art by language. In spite of that, he focuses on the particular over the symbolic. He loathes the effect of art and art as effect, the
“pretension to art,” 7 against which he sets vernacular culture. He is against scenery and for the town; 8 for the collection and against the unique piece; and uninterested in the cult of the fine print and a signature style, preferring to them the delights of anonymity in his search for an absence of style. Detesting journalism, he nevertheless signs on for twenty years with Fortune magazine. Against the militant idealism of art and of his age, he opts for cynicism, exploits the administrative structures of Washington for his own purposes, and keeps the director of photography at the Farm Security Administration guessing. Evans knew how to choose his friends and mentors: Lincoln Kirstein and James Agee were both radicals fighting against the establishment of their time (but succeeding at the same time in taking advantage of it to a remarkable degree). Yet alongside all this are the contradictions of an artist: while declaring that he hates museums and prefers the street,9 he finds himself more than once hanging on the walls of the former, as the unofficial favorite photographer of the Museum of Modern Art. Again, toward the end of his life, we find him proclaiming his “way of seeing” to the impeccably respectable Yale University. But this is where biography takes over from criticism. We must concentrate on his work.
7. Walker Evans, lecture at Yale University, 11 March 1964, in Walker Evans at Work (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), 238. “That thing I’m always talking about (documentary style) shows a purity, a rigor, a simplicity, an immediacy, a clarity which are arrived at through the absence of pretension to art.” 8. Walker Evans, interview with Jeffrey W. Limerick, 20 May 1973. Unpublished. Estate of Walker Evans. “I draw something from being in nature, but I don’t use it. It bores. Those who do [use nature] like [Eliot] Porter and [Ansel] Adams bore me. I'm not interested in their art. I don’t even call it art. I’m interested in the hand of man and civilization.”
9. Leslie Katz, “Interview with Walker Evans,” Art in America, March–April 1971. Reprinted in The Camera Viewed, Vol.1, P. R. Petruck, ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979), 130.
13
24
New York 1928-29
New York 1928-29
New York 1928-29
106
New Orleans Vicinity, 1935
107
202
Hale County, Alabama, 1936
203
Hale County, Alabama, 1936
226
New York, 1938–41
227
New York, 1938–41