Reclaiming History in "Walker Evans: American Photographs" at MoMA
Published on ARTINFO.com
Reclaiming History in “Walker Evans: American Photographs” at MoMA
TEXT: Lori Fredrickson
When a 25-year-old Walker Evans moved to New York in 1927, his earliest experiments in photography fell alongside an increasingly frustrated, primary ambition as a prose writer. If his early camera work has since been iconic in the documentary tradition for its poetics — often referenced for its “Whitman-esque” capture — it also bears a certain resemblance to an equally literary tradition, that is, the writer’s notebook. Jotted-down thoughts, fragmentary ideas presented out of context, and so on; these devices tend to suggest a narrative within unconnected fragments. For Evans, who, as an early writer, was prolific in writing letters, diaries, and short stories, finding such a narrative would have been a habit. This being the particular beauty of his early photo series “American Photographs,” Evans’s failure to complete a full novel may well have given birth to the American Portrait.
Currently on view at MoMA as a 75th-anniversary retrospective, “Walker Evans: American Photographs” commemorates several “firsts,” most significantly the first solo photography exhibition held at the museum, and a rare occasion on which the artist was given a primary role in sequencing its curation. The show’s original, highly unconventional show was hung in an overnight, bourbon-sustained collaboration between Evans, early supporter and museum patron Leonard Kirstein, and MoMA director Thomas Mabry; it was also accompanied by a self-published monograph, which, if hardly the first photography book, is the first to have a sustained impact on defining the photo book as a medium. Now reissued by MoMA in its fifth imprint, the monograph’s jacket statement written by Kirstein — “The reproductions presented in this book are intended to be looked at in their given sequence” — applies as well to the original works on view.
With 60 original prints from the museum’s collection, MoMA’s Sarah Hermann Meister has closely followed the sequencing from the 1938 show and monograph (which varied somewhat by print, if not general order). Arranged across seven walls in one of the museum's fourth floor galleries — one above its permanent photo collection, placing it more in vicinity of paintings by Rauschenberg and Pollock — these fit within two chapters, the first following more an interior view of American life, through portraits, street scenes, and interiors ranging from the Atlanta “Negro Barber Shop” to New York’s “Hudson Street Boarding House Detail.” The second, with many of Evans’s frame-houses, churches, and Victorian homes, as well as broader capture of its ravaged industrial landscapes, contains more of a removed, exterior view.
For even viewers unfamiliar with the photographer, a handful of single images will be immediately recognizable. Captured largely during an 18-month stint with the Farm Securities Administration to document America’s Depression-era byways in the mid-1930s — while often ignoring the political agenda, not to mention its suggested routes — many have since been part of a national historic archive. Others, like the famed “Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer’s Wife,” were captured during Evans’s later travels to the South with writer James Agee on assignment for Fortune magazine, what later became “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” Together, they’re worth revisiting as a history—and one with more pointed relevance in 2013. As a series stretching from Florida’s southern peninsula across the rural byways through the coal-mining territory of the north — up through New York’s 42nd street, and the Coney Island boardwalk — their portrait of a nation in decline is an effective one, with viewpoints both broad and, occasionally, contradictory.
This being Evans’s signature as a series-maker, the individual prints each stand alone as works of art, and their range of subject matter speaks to his breadth of later influence with protégés ranging from Ansel Adams to Diane Arbus. In his landscapes, Evans was as attuned to detail as he was notoriously picky about lighting, often waiting hours for the appropriately moody, foreboding cast on his Southern Victorian ruins, small-town street views, and Alabama church interiors. His straight-framing of sharecropping subjects, a hallmark of the dispassionate style of capture among his FSA contemporaries, at times adds a touch of the surreal, the slightly unbalanced.
For instance, Evans’s portrait of tenant farmer’s wife Ellie Mae Burroughs in fact exists in two slightly varied versions: the first, reproduced in Agee’s book, captures an expression darkly troubled, a more grim parallel to Dorothea Lange’s equally iconic “Migrant Mother.” The second, Evans’s initially preferred portrait and the one chosen for “American Photographs,” captures the ghost of a smile, a more bemused counterpart to an era of massive hardship. Evans was, above all, a master of the subtle visual cue, one that played out as well in his street scenes as in portraits. “South Street, New York” captures a well-tailored man reading the paper on a storefront curb beside two of the stretched-out city homeless. In “Sons of the American Legion,” veterans’ kids, aged 8 to 12, seem alternatively stern or comic, disengaged or disoriented, but all very adult.
Viewed as an intentionally ordered sequence, the variance in subject, with its absence of rational-seeming evolution or trajectory, presents a sense of the illogical, the random. In the exhibition, this begins with a close-up of an empty, oblique New Orleans shopfront, followed by the interior view of an Atlanta barber shop, followed by the close-up capture of a Savannah “Penny Picture Display.” Later prints jump across state, year, and subject, from uninhabited street scenes to street portraits caught unaware, to interiors uninhabited, to close-up street details, to portraits caught in full awareness of the lens. A 1936 image of an auto graveyard in Pennsylvania is followed by an Alabama sharecropping family singing hymns, followed by the same-year “Sons of the American Legion,” followed next by an earlier, 1929 portrait of a fur-clad black woman at 42nd street. Repeating in turn, the apparent disorder develops a more pointed truth organized as chaos.
With prints modestly sized in their 8x10 format, Evans’s 1938 originals might have less of an effect for general audiences today, partly for having become over-familiar: straight-framed isolating views of churches and storefronts have since become a staple of photojournalism, and graffiti close-ups regularly appear on Instagram. What made the monograph “American Photos” something of an original was its self-publication alongside a major exhibition, serving the interests of widespread viewing, rather than distribution as a more-commercial portfolio. Taking place now amid something of a revival of self-published photobooks, the reprint of this monograph also reminds us of its value as a standalone, narrative work.
In his later career as a photo editor for Fortune, Evans’s work would evolve into picture-and-word photo essays, helmed by him from concept through execution—something that was rare then in the magazine world. Now, in a time when the pictorial narrative has been commonly associated more with its since-regular appearance in news journals and publications, and less frequently recognized as a form of “art” — a storytelling essay, after all, is more difficult to sell in galleries than single iconic images — it's worth remembering that the first solo photographic exhibition to make it into MoMA was exactly this. And in looking back on Evans as the founder of “documentary tradition,” it is worth pointing out that this was a phrase that he hated, one that, to him, seemed to undermine his authorial sense of vision. As he pointed out in a 1971 with publisher Leslie Katz: “That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. The term should really be documentary style. An example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene … art is never really a document.”
