Getting to Evans

 I decided the time had come for me to come to grips with the work of Walker Evans.  I have never found myself drawn to it, but it has obviously had great significance for a lot of people who have lauded its uniqueness.

I started off by reading the biography by Belinda Rathbone.  I think this may have been the first of several since produced, and I thought it was a prodigious accomplishment of weaving together interviews, letters and diary entries.  The Rathbone narrative depicts a bright, ambitious artist with what might be interpreted today as a libertarian personality with something of an empathy deficit.

Evans' aim was to create a mirror in which the country could see itself as it was without an excess of interpretation or ideological slant as was the case with some of his FSA-era contemporaries like Dorothea Lange.  Interestingly, one of his early sources of inspiration was Paul Strand, who was thoroughly attached to a revolutionary agenda. His close friends, Agee and Ben Shahn,  were also quite different from Evans in their view of society's ills and possible reforms.

I think Evans undoubtedly succeeded in his documentary goal, but it seems there is some justification for the proposition that his goal was too limited, particularly in regard to his portraits, both the formal versions done with large format, and the on-the-fly examples coming from the Rollei, the Leica and the Contax.  The people shots seem to me to resemble  rather dry, scientific portrayals - completely accurate in detail, but almost devoid of much real feeling for the life experiences of those captured on film.

With the thought in mind that some of my negativity toward Evans was due to not seeing quality reproductions of his images, I made a trip across town to the Cherry Hills branch library to borrow a copy of Many Are Called, a selection from six hundred hip shots made in NYC subway cars from 1938 to 1941.  In the book, only published over twenty years later,  the period dress styles are well documented, but the mostly vacant expressions of the subjects reveal little of the fraught times in which the pictures were made.

Evans had made candid street pictures before using a right-angle finder on his Leica.  However, that was not a technique suited to the subway environment.  For Many Are Called he strapped a Contax II to his chest with the lens peeking out between two buttons of his overcoat, and with a long cable release running inside his sleeve to a bulb release in his hand. The shiny chrome surfaces of the camera were blackened to further obscure the presence of the camera.

Evans' technique for getting pictures without looking through the viewfinder has been described in every account of the project, but I have not seen anyone refer to the fact that the camera had a knob advance which must have required some rather awkward manipulation , presumably through an inside slit in the pocket of his coat.

The dim incandescent lighting in the old subway cars must have presented a challenge.  The f1.5/50mm Sonnar lens would have been up to the low light conditions, but using its maximum aperture would have meant a serious limitation on the depth of focus. On the other hand, Evans' subjects were securely anchored in place at a firmly established distance from the photographer on the car's opposite side.

I do like many of Evans' pictures of city and small town scenes including the storefronts, signage and posters.

 

I would be very interested in seeing some opinions about Evans from present day observers; I am open to the idea I may have missed some crucial aspects of his work.