WALKER EVANS

In 1930 a disaffected young photographer in New York pointed his camera at two workers shoving a huge sign reading DAMAGED into a truck. With that image, Walker Evans gave birth to the quirky, edgy genre of street photography. Yes, this is the same Walker Evans famous for eye-level photographs of Alabama sharecroppers, rural churches and roadside signs. The special appeal of Walker Evans is that—in addition to nearly 200 classic photographs—it offers new images and fresh assessments of his work, based on diaries, letters, field notes and unpublished negatives acquired a decade ago by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The engagingly written essays by four specialists all bump up against the contradictory impulses of this meticulous, aloof yet curiously passionate artist. A self-described "gray man," he hated color photography. Yet the photographs from his final years--he died in 1975--include strikingly offbeat Polaroids of the glum or startled faces of friends and acquaintances. Four decades earlier, too inhibited to confront strangers directly, he hid a camera in his coat to capture the slack faces of subway riders. Despite the unadorned power of his images of people, Evans had a deeper connection to vernacular architecture and roadside signs. He photographed these everyday subjects straight on, at eye level, deliberately opting for the most deadpan approach. Yet the images are imbued with Evans' unique sensitivity to subtle visual rhythms. Influenced by Surrealism, he freely cropped photographs to shift the viewer’s perspective. Despite his ardent scrutiny of the American scene in the 1930s, Evans stood apart from politics and disdained both sentimentality and social criticism. His omnivorous appetite for the culture of his time was tempered by the sober documentary influence of nineteenth century photographers Eugène Atget and Matthew Brady. For all its shrewd commentary, this beautifully produced book discusses Evans' life only insofar as it illuminates the story of the photographs. More detailed accounts are available in biographies by James R. Mellow and Belinda Rathbone