| by Maurizio Berlincioni
Walker Evans was born in St Louis, Missouri, of well-off parents. After having studied in various exclusive schools like Williams College in Massachusetts, he worked at New York's Public Library for a short period. In 1926 he left for Paris where for a year he attended various courses at the Sorbonne. He was greatly struck by the photographic work of Nadar and to an even greater extent by that of Atget.
Returning to the United States, he decided to become a photographer and inwardly began to compare himself with the two most successful figures of the era: Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. He didn't much care for the work of either of them: that of Stieglitz he considered too concentrated on the artistic aspect and that of Steichen he judged too commercial. Evans rejected these two models and to emphasize the fact, from 50 editions of Camera Work, the magazine published by Stieglitz, he found only one single picture that genuinely succeeded in moving him: that of the blind beggar by Paul Strand.
He joined the staff at FSA in 1935, simultaneously with Dorothea Lange. From the very beginning of his career we find him out and about in the southern and central states, with his inseparable large camera (a folding 20x25), constantly intent with an honesty that brooked no compromise, with a clear austere and straightforward vision, on gathering direct and often frontal material on the conditions of the countryside, on the situation of the tenants, on their dwellings, their property, methods of work, on the crops, the schools, the warehouses. Often he omits to catch the inhabitants of these buildings but whoever looks at his photos will easily succeed in imagining their presence and appearance.
The object of this enquiry was not so much the landscape that surrounds the cities ( not the large cities but the small provincial ones) as the cities themselves and their relationship with the surrounding environment.
Evans prefers the industrial environment to that of the agricultural one and his puritan eye ( as Lincoln Kirsten defined it in his foreword to the wonderful exhibition that MOMA of New York dedicated to him in 1938) dwells long and hard on the borderline between countryside and the suburbs that inexorably gnaw away at the natural environment. Photographs by Walker Evans
in a book published
in USA | 
|
The other subject that Evans attentively and eagerly confronted was architecture, and it's through his reading of it that he succeeds in revealing to us with astounding clarity the distinctive course of American life and culture.
Viewed independently Evans' pictures transmit the unmistakable sense of the individual places; taken as a whole they evoke in a choral manner the sense of this great Country.
A man of character, introverted, ironic, sceptical and aristocratic, he rarely enjoyed a good relationship with Stryker who on the otherhand was extrovert, rowdy and optimistic in the conviction that the FSA was an efficient collective instrument for resolving the evils of America. For his part, Evans was profoundly convinced that the artist creates his finest work alone and that anyway his essential role remains that of describing life and not that of trying to modify the world.
Evans was sure that it was his work and that of his friend Ben Shahn that decisively influenced the sense and style of the entire project and many years later, towards the end of his career, it was Stryker himself who admitted how important the influence of Evans had been with regards to his understanding of the infinite potential of photography a{ an expressive medium.
This difficulty of his with getting on with people explains more than any words the reasons why Evans was one of the first collaborators to be fired when the government agency's budget was reduced. From 1943 until 1965 he worked as a journalist and photographer, for two years for Time magazine, moving on afterwards to the editorial staff of Fortune. In 1965 he retired from his profession as photographer so as to dedicate himself to the teaching of graphic art at New York's Yale University.
Evans' most fruitful period can be traced back to those years he spent collaborating with the FSA and most of the pictures published in his two most famous books, American Photographs and Let us Now Praise Famous Men were indeed taken in these years.
His work has left a profound mark on many of the noteworthy photographers that followed him, like Robert Frank and Harry Callahan - to name but two of the many candidates - who in their turn have also influenced numerous younger photographers: in this sense it by no means seems excessive to label Walker Evans a true great master.
(© 1997 M.Berlincioni)
Bibliography
|
