Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch

By Svetlana Alpers

A magisterial study of celebrated photographer Walker Evans

Walker Evans (1903–75) was a great American artist photographing people and places in the United States in unforgettable ways. He is known for his work for the Farm Security Administration, addressing the Great Depression, but what he actually saw was the diversity of people and the damage of the long Civil War. In Walker Evans, renowned art historian Svetlana Alpers explores how Evans made his distinctive photographs. Delving into a lavish selection of Evans’s work, Alpers uncovers rich parallels between his creative approach and those of numerous literary and cultural figures, locating Evans within the wide context of a truly international circle.

Alpers demonstrates that Evans’s practice relied on his camera choices and willingness to edit multiple versions of a shot, as well as his keen eye and his distant straight-on view of visual objects. Illustrating the vital role of Evans’s dual love of text and images, Alpers places his writings in conversation with his photographs. She brings his techniques into dialogue with the work of a global cast of important artists—from Flaubert and Baudelaire to Elizabeth Bishop and William Faulkner—underscoring how Evans’s travels abroad in such places as France and Cuba, along with his expansive literary and artistic tastes, informed his quintessentially American photographic style.

A magisterial account of a great twentieth-century artist, Walker Evans urges us to look anew at the act of seeing the world—to reconsider how Evans saw his subjects, how he saw his photographs, and how we can see his images as if for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Oct 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9780691210896

Book preview

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CAPTIONS TO THE PLATES

NOTE: All works are by Walker Evans. Numbers appearing in the margins of the main text refer to the plate numbers listed below.

WALKER EVANS

STARTING FROM SCRATCH

Svetlana Alpers

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

To the memory of Adrienne Rich,

who also had an eye

CONTENTS

Preface  viii

Introduction: Evans’s Eye  1

1    Evans’s France: Real and Virtual  13

2    The Possibility of the Medium  68

3    Cuban Days  92

4    Evans’s America: Life and Art  113

5    Subway Portraits  158

6    Time Out for Fortune  171

7    Turning In  188

Afterword  211

Notes  214

List of Illustrations  237

Index  247

Acknowledgments  256

PREFACE

A young man born in the Midwest in 1903 to modest privilege, possessing a literary turn of mind and a way with words, familiar with the French language, an admirer of French life and literature —in particular Flaubert and Baudelaire (but also Gide and Cendrars)—returns to New York after a year in France in 1926–27, rejoices as the wealthy are struck down in the Crash of 1929, picks up a camera and almost from the start makes remarkable photographs of the world as he sees it, which is American.

This book is my first about a photographer and also my first about an American. I come to Walker Evans from a lifetime of looking and writing about European painting. At college, I studied literature but turned away from it because of my delight in the singularity of a painting. It is a material object instead of a text that exists in many printings and is open to interpretation without end. It was not interpretation but rather making that interested me. I was not there, of course, but my fiction has been that I could give an account of an artist making a work.

Photography throws much of that in doubt. First of all, photographs are not singular. Secondly, the making of photographs is not only different from the making of paintings, but it is hard to put one’s finger on it. A photograph is taken, often many of the same subject, a negative is made, it is edited (as Evans termed it), and then it can be printed in different ways, at different sizes, and exhibited and looked at in different ways, whether in a book (Evans’s preferred form), in a magazine, on a wall. So where do we locate the making?

Some photographers have had a close relationship to painting. In mid-nineteenth-century France, many photographers were first trained as painters. In the twentieth century, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn started as painters, and Cartier-Bresson returned to drawing when he stopped making photographs. Though he made some minimalist paintings, Evans insisted that photography was different. Coming from painting as I do, being clear about the difference matters. When a photograph is good, it is good in its own way. But, also, surprising to me, despite its deep difference there are pleasures in Evans’s work—thoughts stirred and passions awakened—that are a match for those found in painting.

Literature was more important for Evans than painting. Photography, he claimed, is the most literary of the graphic arts. Having left the study of literature for painting, I was surprised to find that Walker Evans, reader, writer, as well as photographer, brought me back to texts and to consider the wisdom of his claim.

At the present moment, when photography is collected by art museums and private people, the issue of whether it is or when it became an art is still being bandied about. I agree with Gombrich who wrote simply and truly, "There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists." The question does not interest me, but it must to be addressed.

I began writing this book thinking that Walker Evans was the classic photographer, a kind of benchmark. The photographs he made, the way he went about making them, and also the nature of the man who made them were exemplary. But though many of his photographs look classic, I now think rather that he was unique. It is the distinctiveness of his practice that is striking. Let me draw up a list: the insistence that having an eye is the essential thing; the disdain for beautiful prints because the editing of the negative mattered more than printing; finally —astounding to photographers I know—on different occasions, for different venues or presentations, the opting for different versions of a single picture. Evans was not out to make an iconic image.

I hope that those who don’t know Evans will discover his greatness. In that sense, this book is addressed to people who assume that writing and painting can be great but might have doubts about photographs. But it is addressed also to those who love photographs and might find their taste expanded by this consideration of what Walker Evans made.

The title playfully suggests some of the multiple points (let me list four) taken up in this book: it assumes that photographing the world does not come out of a tradition but rather from a fresh act of looking; it indicates Evans’s circumstance when he takes up the camera instead of a pen; it describes the quintessential situation of America, and what made photography an American medium; finally, it speaks to what I feel turning from the study of historic painting to Walker Evans and from Europe to America.

INTRODUCTION

EVANS’S EYE

It is striking that again and again Walker Evans remarks forcefully, even aggressively, that what makes him different from other photographers is that he has an eye. It might seem an obvious thing for a photographer to say, but indeed it has not been, and Evans knew it. Instead of the camera, it was the eye he spoke of as the major thing for him in photography.

I have made a brief list (in the manner of Evans, who was himself a maker of lists) of some of his remarks, annotated to give the context.

• Quoted in Time on the occasion of his Chicago exhibition (1947): "After 20-odd years of work I still have great difficulty maintaining enough calm to operate well, at moments when some sort of perfection is in sight."

• In a New Yorker article, ending with his comment on what he teaches students at Yale University (1966): "what it is really is is a non-stop bull-session on the art of seeing. Photography isn’t a matter of taking pictures. It’s a matter of having an eye."

• A proposed title for his essay on photography for Louis Kronenberger (1969): "The Seeing-Eye Man"

• Comments on making the photograph Corrugated Tin Façade (1971): "The photograph is an instinctive reaction to a visual object." [Plate 1]

• Speaking of teaching at Yale (1971): "I just used it to go off freely and do exactly what came before my eye. And, Yes, it’s the seeing that I am talking about. Oh yes."

• Interviewed about his photography as compared with that of other photographers who worked at the time (1930s) for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) (1977): "I knew at the time who I was in terms of the eye, and I had a real eye, and other people were occasionally phony about it, or they really did not see."

• A Yale interview (1974): "A garbage can, occasionally, to me at least, can be beautiful. That’s because you’re seeing. Some people are able to see that—see it and feel it. I lean towards the enchantment, the visual power, of the esthetically rejected subject."

• A lecture given at Radcliffe two days before his death (1975): "I have a theory that seems to work with me that some of the best things you ever do sort of come through you. You don’t know where you get the impetus and the response to what is before your eyes, but you are using your eyes all the time and teaching yourself really from morning to night."

• A quote from Joseph Conrad’s preface to Nigger of the Narcissus that repeatedly reappears in Evans’s handwriting on pieces of paper in his archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: My task . . . is before all to make you see.

• People who knew Evans admired him particularly for his eye. James Agee wrote (1937): "[he] has the best eye I know . . . the strictest and clearest theory, meaning knowledge, of what the eye and a camera . . . can and can not do."

• Evans is described as using his eye on a camera-less walk with Nora Sayre, a young friend with whom he kept company in New York and London in his later years:

When I met Evans I wasn’t skilled at using my eyes: almost all my training had been for the ear, language and music. The reticent observer was generous with his insights when one took a walk with him. The walks were lengthy and no one could hurry him: as the writer James Stern said, he was slow as a hearse. Wandering along Third Avenue or down the Chelsea Embankment, he would seize my shoulders—Look!—and wheel me around to focus on whatever he’d just seen: there was always a view or a detail I hadn’t noticed. A Victorian lamppost or the texture of old stone, a batch of secondhand bathtubs for sale on a sidewalk, the juxtaposition of several buildings—each time Evans showed me where to stand, steering me into seeing from a fresh perspective. At such moments he seemed easily enraptured: how much pleasure he derived from a bit of iron grillwork or a reflection in a window.

That is the evidence. But what is it evidence of? How does having an eye work in the process of making a photograph? Do Evans’s photographs look a certain way because of it? The introductory pages that follow suggest preliminary answers to those questions.

Let’s turn to a case in which we have part of an answer in Evans’s own words. He is describing photographing Corrugated Tin Façade in Moundville, Alabama, in 1936 [Plate 1]. But let me look first: the image is formidably flat, the complex, almost shadowless surface of variegated greys, simple vertical strips of worked tin shimmering in the cross light and marked with lettered signs, constitutes the false front of a contractor’s building, centered and viewed straight on, closed in at left and