Walker EvansRezensionen

This book is a collaboration between The Friends of Photography, San Francisco, and The Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, in association with The University of New Mexico Press. With text by Thomas W. Southall, stories by William Christenberry, and excerpts from the writing of James Agee, it presents black & white photos taken by Walker Evans in the Depression South and color photos taken recently by painter and photographer William Christenberry of many of the places Evans visited, places that Christenberry knows intimately , having been born and raised there or nearby.

The introduction by Lloyd Fonvielle is one of the more informative I have read in the Masters of Photography series. In addition to a renowned photographer, Evans served as in an editorial role at Fortune Magazine for 20 years and as a professor at Yale University for the last ten years of his life.

Evans photographs documented the dark, ominous streets (Factory Street, Amsterdam, New York, 1930) and the nobility (Floyd Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama, 1936) and playfulness (Roadside Store Between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, Alabama, 1936) of people in the great depression.

Michael Brown Rare Books

Beautiful.
Visceral.
Astonishing and courageous, and so timely.

You wanna crab about the wi-fi being down? Try living without window screens, on a sub-nutritious diet of sorghum, field peas, and coffee, playing the losing, desperate economic roulette of the barely-literate Alabama cotton sharecropper in 1936, and see how your priorities might change.

A heartrending eyewitness account of the desperate plight of sharecroppers and tenant farmers of Alabama during the 1930s. A very important piece of American history told in stark, elegant prose and photographs. It is a companion piece to “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”. I think the legacy of exploitation affects us today.

Photographs from the Great Depression paired with poems by Cynthia Rylant . . . loved the idea, but was a bit disappointed in the outcome. The copyright is 1994, so maybe no one is even interested in a review at this point, but here it is. I liked the variety of topics, but felt that, overall, the poems and photos could have given a more distinctive view of that time. "Shoes" was perhaps my favorite poem along with "Utensils" and its accompanying photograph. "Minstrels," however, implied that African Americans wholeheartedly enjoyed their part in a show that stereotyped them and undermined their intelligence. I wonder, in this terrible age of mass murder by guns, if Rylant might rethink her "Gunshop" poem now. I'm also confused as to how newspaper on the wall frustrates mosquitoes.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is James Agee's and Walker Evans' famous book about white sharecroppers* in Hale County, Alabama during the Great Depression. It was the outgrowth of a report they did for Fortune magazine, a report which was not published, for reasons that are not certain, and that had long been thought lost. This is that report. It is blunt and unsparing. It is an indictment of the agricultural, social and political systems of the South that kept hard-working people living in appalling conditions, poorly nourished, undereducated, and eternally in debt to those whose land they tilled.

This is a straight-forward telling. It is not prettified or fictionalized. In this report, unlike their book, the families are given their true names. The descriptions of their daily lives, the rhythm of their months and years, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the work they do, are terse, almost list-like, but all the more compelling for that.

Yet Agee's words still astonish. Read his description of the cotton fields ready for picking, look how he juxtaposes an image of light with an image of ugliness : "Late in August the fields begin to whiten more rarely with late blooms and more frequently with cotton and then still thicker with cotton, like a sparkling ground starlight; and the wide tremendous light holds the earth beneath a glass vacuum and a burning glass. The bolls are rusty green, are bronze, are split and burst and splayed open in a loose vomit of cotton . . . There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening." The same is true of Evans' photographs. These faces lined with hardship, with work and starvation, still have in them a delicacy, a reflection of all that is human. Look at the photos of Floyd Burroughs and his wife, Allie May, look at their eyes. There is a sadness in his, a worn-out-ness, while hers still have a hint of the beauty she must once have been, a hint of humor, too.

We mustn't read this as history, though it was written more than 70 years ago. Things have improved, no doubt, for people like the Burroughs and the Fields and the Tingles. But our cities could use a team like Agee & Evans to document the social and economic injustices that have not been eradicated, but seem only to have become urban rather than rural. I call this "uncomfortable reading" because, if we are honest, we know that we cannot say "that's over and done with", and we must confront the failures of our current age.

* a note on this. Agee & Evans deliberately chose to focus on white families, because, as Agee says, "Any honest consideration of the Negro would crosslight and distort the issue with the problems not of a tenant but of a race . . ."

I'm accustomed to Cynthia Rylant's childrens books, so her poetry here was a fascinating departure to me. Loved the choice of Depression era photographs by Walker Evans, and Rylant's companion poems were quite interesting. Hard to pick a favorite here.

The history of photography is illustrated with a few best hits from a photographer's life work, repeated to the point of being obligatory. (Think Weston, pepper 30 or Evans' family portrait that graces the cover of this book.) But here is a wide enough selection from a broad enough range of space and time to more carefully evaluate the photographer's abilities.

These photographs of New York City subway riders, made in the late 1930's and early 1940's show the blank preoccupation of people trapped between places, with little to help pass time except, in few cases, a newspaper, or conversation. This contrasts with contemporary subway passengers in, say, London, or those riding the Bart in San Francisco where most are preoccupied with electronic devices, or interaction with their neighbor, although you can still find the kind pf blankness that dominates Evan's book. Was it the nature of what he way, or the choices he made shooting, or editing that give his work it's dominate visual nature and mood? Method, stealthy observations with the 35mm in dim overhead light, rather than elegant graphic structions of Evan's famous work, dominate this project.

For the hour or two it takes you to browse through this book, you'll be transported back to a time when people looked old beyond their years, paint was hard to find, and dust was everywhere. Yet through the magic of photography, you'll be pulled into these pictures and feel drawn to the people and places they depict. What would it have been like to eat at one of the restaurants shown here, for instance? How many of the young children are still alive, in their late seventies or eighties, and do they know they are captured here forever?

Además de la reproducción de las obras que se presentan en la exposición, el catálogo incorpora dos estudios que aportan un mayor conocimiento de la obra de nuestro protagonista. Jordan Bear, investigador de la Universidad de Columbia, en “Walker Evans: en el reino de lo cotidiano”, ha escrito una completa biografía basada en los manuscritos del Archivo Walker Evans custodiado en el Metropolitan Museum, un ensayo que resulta un complemento perfecto de las obras de Gilles Mora y John T. Hill, Jerry L. Thompson y Belinda Rathbone. A su vez, Chema González, investigador, crítico y comisario independiente, en “Walker Evans y la invención del estilo documental” aborda las creaciones de Evans en el contexto de la historia del arte y de la fotografía del siglo XX, poniendo de manifiesto su relación con determinadas estéticas (simbolismo, pictorialismo, surrealismo) y su compromiso con una fotografía que reivindica lo vernáculo y que constituye un retrato exacto de la sociedad norteamericana del siglo XX.

Una conversación de Jeff L. Rosenheim con Vicent Todolí, director de la Tate Modern, a propósito de los logros y el legado de Walker Evans y del papel de la fotografía en el arte moderno, y una detallada bibliografía elaborada por Jordan Bear, completan un catálogo llamado a ser una referencia inexcusable para entender a uno de los más grandes fotógrafos del siglo XX

Gift from Nadia VALLA Mamaroneck December 2022