Walker Evans
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Walker Evans Details
Amazon.com 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, the Fitzgeralds, Hemingway, the Murphys, and Joyce among them. 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 States, 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 catalog 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 of prints, negatives, diaries, working notes, letters, and other writings. In the process of planning the show, its curators discovered hundreds of previously unknown negatives stored at the Library of Congress. From this vast source, they constructed the show and its companion book. The catalog'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 works like his New York subway portraits in depth. But the real treat is to browse the nearly 200 plates, each reproduced from vintage prints in the museum's archive and private collections. Evans's early work focused on New York City--the proverbial bright lights of Broadway, the carnival atmosphere of Coney Island, the clutter of workers and shoppers and cars and advertisements in its streets. Soon he 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 color, but his imagery remained consistent: signs, architecture, and seemingly inconsequential details like a Peg-Board full of kitchen utensils dominate. 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 Read more From Library Journal Walker Evans, the Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalog to its current major retrospective, is a rock-solid work providing biographical, historical, and visual accounts of the artist's life and work. Hambourg, an assistant curator in the museum's Department of Photography, edited this big book with the straightforward approach that Evans employed in his art. Careful reproduction of well-known black-and-white and little-known color photographs by Evans forms the heart of the volume. There are quality essays here as well, biographical and analytical writing that effectively places Evans's visual efforts in social and territorial context. From the self-portrait on the cover to the notebook entries to the many photographs clustered along the way, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology quickly broadens the popular view of the photographer as a chronicler of 1930s America with black-and-white film in his camera. Gathered from many files in the large and varied Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these collected writings, photos, and ephemera give us a socially concerned writer, artist, and meticulous keeper of his life's work along with his opinions and his collections of postcards. This version of Evans shakes him free of any narrow channel in which we placed him. He led a robust life, and the stillness that comes from his Depression-era work is shaken up by this energized look at the photographer. Walker Evans pointed a camera at his world and let the documentary result speak as his art. Chief curator in the Museum of Modern Art's Department of Photography, Galassi has taken that objective eye as his theme. Gathering over 300 works from several media by 100 artists, Galassi gives us a volume of reportorial art, showing people, places, and things in "as is" condition. Evans touched people with his photographs because he merged his images with their "real lives." The question of whether other artists using other means were influenced by Evans's work or simply liberated to offer a visual vernacular landscape is incidental here. Galassi's book succeeds because his choices match his theme so well and play off the many examples of Evans's work that unite these pages. Though the Metropolitan catalog is the first choice for purchase, all three books are well recommended for all types of libraries and essential for serious art collections.DDavid Bryant, New Canaan Lib., CT Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From The New Yorker 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. Read more From Booklist Evans (1903^-75) and his epoch-defining photographs have been the subject of many books, including recent biographies by Belinda Rathbone and James Mellow. But this magnificent volume is unique in its blend of critical and biographical commentary with 250 richly reproduced photographs (many previously unknown). Hambourg, curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and several members of her staff have mined the deep treasure of the museum's recently acquired Walker Evans Archive, an extensive collection of negatives, letters, and diaries, to create a multifaceted portrait of the artist. Hambourg begins with an agile essay on Evans' early years, when literature was his religion and James Joyce, Hemingway, and e. e. cummings were his gods. But photography, not writing, liberated his creative spirit. Language did play a crucial role in his compositions, however, as did a love of architecture and film and an acute sensitivity to the psychology of portraiture. Evans' tremendous influence on photography is also shrewdly analyzed. His most famous works are here, as are his late, rarely seen color images. Donna Seaman Read more 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"Evans has long been established as a master, a maker of individual images that are authoritative in both technique and theme. . . . [Walker Evans] is destined to become the standard reference for Evans's career."---Benjamin Lima, Art Journal"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"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)"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"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)"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"[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"This is a book on Evan's photography, not on his life. . . [and it includes] a series of focused, well written essays, on his development as an artist."---Jean Dykstra, Art on Paper"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 Read more About the Author In the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Maria Morris Hambourg is Curator in Charge, Jeff L. Rosenheim is Associate Curator, Douglas Eklund is Assistant Curator, and Mia Fineman is Research Associate. Read more
Reviews
This book is truly fascinating, both for the information written about artist Walker Evans and his life as well as the photographs from his work. I love it for the subject matter that Walker Evans chose. There are a lot of photos of places where very poor Southern people live and also photos of very poor families and individuals as well as small town scenes, signs, etc.. Evans really has a talent for capturing the despair and souls of his poverty-stricken subjects, and you get to see how beautiful they are in their simplicity. There are also a lot of interesting photos of American architecture, including some cityscapes.This book is the "first full-length study" of Evans and uses information gained from his "diaries, papers, and negatives of Evan's personal collection." There are 6 essays written about Evans revealing information that was not previously understood about Evans such as his relationships with other artists, his intellectual development, what his goals and methods of procedures were, etc..