Ah, yes, Evans’s incomparable style – how to describe it? Alpers shows the way. She says of his Girl in Fulton Street:
But it was the woman on Fulton Street who caught Evans’s eye – a more firmly stationed version of the one in France, face three-quarter viewed, head defined by a fitted black cloche, coat marked by a large fur collar and muff. A strip of three negatives (unfortunately not numbered) leaves a trail of Evans’s pursuit. Both she and he hold still (he here with a small camera), while men wearing fedora hats move by and in between. Evans was attracted to reflections in the window glass behind her, the rising diagonal of the crane near her head, the sign with the letter R, more bits of sign over the window and the lettering SPAGHETTI above her head. The reflecting band widens and wanes, faces and hats come in between, and finally he gets his shot. In the mid-sized reflection there is a building, the figure of a hatted man and things not quite possible to read. To capture it all he sacrificed the sign with letters spelling out SPAGHETTI, but he retained its lower frame above her head.
Not content to just describe, Alpers also analyzes:
It is hard to put one’s finger on what is so remarkable here, but it is worth trying because the elements occur again and again in Evans’s work. First, there is the distant take he has on a woman seen. Her power is in her presence – the set look of the features and her costume. Given the formality of his address she seems not simply dressed, but in costume. He does not probe further. He likes what he sees and lets her be. There is a resistance to judge or intervene in any way. That holding back, that keeping his distance, is a great skill. I could say (and I do believe) that that is the basis to the nature of photography. But indeed it is Evans with the camera. She is still while around her swirls the world. – Fulton Street, the city. The swirl is provisional, thrown together from pieces of steel, iron, glass, cloth, stone. And her presence holds out, as it were, against the world. Surely when he saw the woman the periphery also caught his eye.
I find such descriptive analysis thrilling. Alpers’ book brims with it.
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| Walker Evans, Girl in Fulton Street, New York (1929) |
But Alpers also makes some questionable statements. For example, in the Preface, she says, “First of all, photographs are not singular.” Later in the book, she contradicts herself. She says of Evans’s famous portrait of Ellie Mae Burroughs (Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936), “Evans’s photograph of Burroughs is a singular image, though not a portrait of someone great. How is it singular? How did that come about?”
She continues,
Attempts to explain it have dwelt on the special encounter between the photographer and his subject. Evans with his 8 x 10 view camera stood less than three feet away from the serious, gaunt woman backed up against the clapboard wall of her house. She takes her place before the camera and establishes herself as a subject in her own right rather than serving as an object before Evans’s camera. That makes the singularity of the woman in the photograph a matter of relationship – photographer and subject rather than photographer and object. It was famously praised in those terms by Lionel Trilling.
Surely, Alpers is right about the Burroughs portrait; it is singular. And so are Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931), Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania (1935), and many, many other Evans images. So it strikes me as a curious thing to say, at the beginning of her book, that photographs aren’t singular, when the rest of her text argues they are.
Another questionable observation she makes is “An essential quality of a great photograph is that it makes the world strange.” Really? What is strange about Evans’s photos? Alpers appears to define “strange” in terms of either surrealism or abstraction. She says, “Though we have become used to them in the almost two centuries since their invention, photographs are visually unexpected and strange in nature. Surreal is a default of photography.” A few lines later, she adds, “Another default of photography on exhibit at Levy’s gallery during those years was abstraction.” But later, she contends that Evans avoided surrealism and abstraction:
The surreal and the abstract are defaults for the camera. They are seductive moves for a photographer. Neither surrealism nor abstraction was a possibility of the medium for Evans. They were seductions that he avoided.
So in what way are Evans’s photos strange? I question Alpers’ premise. Not all photographers make the world strange. Many – Evans included, I’d argue – are just out to show the world as it is. Evans’s style is nothing if not matter-of-fact. I find it difficult to square his factual style with a word like “strange.” Maybe I’m just hung up on the word. “Strange” to me means peculiar, weird, odd, bizarre. Evans’s photos don’t strike me as any of those things. But as soon as I say that, I recall Geoff Dyer’s wonderful reading of Evans’s Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931):
And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems, for the street looks like it might not be a street and could actually pass for a canal or river. Asked, rhetorically, what he most loves Joseph Brodsky replies, unhesitatingly, “Rivers and streets – the long things of life.” Evans’s photo is the representation of this longed for elision. Not so much parked as moored, the cars seem oddly amphibious. The trees have something of the watery melancholy of weeping willows. There is a touch of Venice or Amsterdam about the scene. You feel that if you wanted to cross this wet road a bridge would come in handy. The impression of a street as waterway is enhanced by the way it kinks, bends, before dissolving not in countryside or suburbs but into a damp mist that might be the sea. The carefully incremented details – cars, trees, buildings – fade and recede into an unfathomable, indistinct mass of grey. That’s when you realize that although it may be a picture of a street that looks like a river, its real subject is time. And it was not quite right to say that “to look at this photograph is to walk down the street shown in it.” More accurately – and even more remarkably – it is to have walked down it, before returning to one’s room at the United States Hotel and looking down at the rain-slick street. [The Ongoing Moment, 2005]
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| Walker Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931) |
And yet, the more I look at this photo the stranger it seems … – So there you go, I’ve contradicted my own argument. Perhaps every photo, if looked at closely enough, imaginatively enough, appears strange. I just wish Alpers had elaborated a bit more on what she means by “making the world strange,” especially in view of her ruling out, in Evans’s case, both surrealism and abstraction.
Another curious statement made by Alpers is that “It is in the nature of a photograph by Evans, that a story is promised.” I’m not sure about that. Later in the book, Alpers quotes John Szarkowski as saying, “Intuitively, he [the photographer] sought and found the significant detail. His work, incapable of narrative, turned toward symbol.” Incapable of narrative – this is closer to my own view of Evans’s photos. I see them as images – pure images – not stories, not symbols – images that stand for themselves. It seems to me that Alpers eventually swings around to this viewpoint when she says, “Put succinctly, a photograph by Evans is seeing and (in my own words) also telling. The word telling used here not so much as in ‘to tell a story,’ but as in 'having a striking or telling effect.' ”
So these are some of the questions arising from my reading of this absorbing book. But they’re mere quibbles compared to the many satisfactions it affords. This book helped me grasp why I love Evans’s photos so much. It abounds in illuminating observations. For example:
Keep in mind his taste for tin. It was a humble American material and attracted Evans’s eye.
But finding the right place to stand, the right view, is the heart of the matter for Evans.
It is not only the look of his photographs that is classic, but also their making.
The flatness and right-angled structure of buildings built from over-lapping strips of wood painted white or left bare are the American county churches and houses of Evans’s photographs. Not thick halls of marble, but thin walls of wood. Evans’s level, centered, straight-on photography is at one with that aesthetic.
Reading Flaubert sharpens our looking at Evans.
Evans repeatedly does re-takes on Atget – mirrors, carts, the wild cactus in Truro seen in one of the interiors favored for a lifetime by Evans and before by Atget.
Evans made the expected photographs of a much-admired, new modern house, but preferred to photograph an old fisherman.
Evans had a taste for brooms in his interiors. There is a sense in which, metaphorically, they emphasize the clean style of his photographic address.
The finest photographs are the tightest and leanest.
Following Evans along the trail of photographs made, reproduced, admired, and written about is different from following the trail of the life.
To me, it seems likely that it was something simpler, more basic: that in the strange, withdrawn state of the individuals down in the subway he found versions of himself.
Forget the vernacular as such for its own sake, what interests him is the beauty of what, in a dense phrase, he describes as (let me repeat) the esthetically rejected object.
At the end of the day and of his life, the photographer for us to turn to when we look at how Evans approached the end is Eugène Atget.
I admire Alpers’ writing immensely. She lets the reader in on her thought processes. Her analytical moves are dazzling. “Let us begin with three Cuban photographs and see where they lead,” she says, and I’m right there with her, happy to tag along.
My favorite sentence in Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch occurs during Alpers’ description of Evans’s great Moving Truck and Bureau Mirror, Brooklyn, New York (1929-31). Noting the “tightly knit jumble of things captured by Evans’s photograph,” she says, “It is the Flaubertian airlessness of the cactus at Truro all over again.”
The book is beautifully produced, with a gallery of 143 Evans photos at the front. Each photo is numbered, and the number helpfully appears in the margin of the text, whenever a photo is discussed. Time and again, I found myself using this feature to quickly flip back to the portfolio, looking afresh at the pictures in light of Alpers’ insightful commentary.
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