Photography Is Not Description

Eugène Atget, Café, Boulevard Montparnasse, 6th and 14th Arrondissement (1925)

John Szarkowski, in his brilliant Atget (2000), wrote, “Atget’s art was based on the identification and clear description of significant fact.” An excellent observation, except the word “description” muddies its meaning. Photography doesn’t describe; it transcribes. It records. 

John Berger, in his Understanding a Photograph (2013), said, “Unlike any other visual image, a photograph is not a rendering, an imitation, or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace of it.”

Stanley Cavell, in his Cavell on Film (2005), put it this way:

A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it, hence it is that it may be called a transcription. 

Perhaps I’m too hung up on this distinction between description and transcription. But, too me, it seems crucial. It’s the difference between painting and photography. It’s the difference between writing and photography.

I’d amend Szarkowski’s sentence to “Atget’s art was based on the identification and clear transcription of significant fact.” 

Svetlana Alpers' "Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch"

I’m a fan of Walker Evans’s photography. I first encountered it forty years ago when a friend gave me a slim, elegant volume of Evans’s photos published by Aperture – #10 in its series Masters of Photography. I’m also a fan of Svetlana Alpers’ writing. I first encountered it in 1983, when I read her superb The Art of Describing. Both these items – Evans’s photography and Alpers’ writing – come together deliciously in Alpers’ new book Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch. It’s a study of the way Evans made his pictures. It moves sagaciously, omnivorously through Evans’s oeuvre, starting with his brilliant Corrugated Tin Façade, Moundville, Alabama (1936), looping back to his first pictures (e.g., Girl in Fulton Street, New York, 1929), then proceeding chronologically through his work (Interior Detail of a Portuguese House, Vagrant in the Prado of Havana, Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation, Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, and many, many more) right up to his death in 1975, tracking the development of his style. 

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.

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]

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. 

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" 's Beautiful Marriage of Photos and Text

Photo by Walker Evans, from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Jefferson Hunter, in his Image and Word (1987), contends that the photos and text of James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) “work against” each other. He says, “One might, perhaps, think of the text of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an enormously expanded, limit-defying caption, but it is a caption working against the Evans photographs.”

Hunter isn’t the first to make this point. Janet Malcolm, in her superb “Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Pa.” (The New Yorker, August 6, 1979; included in her Diana & Nikon, 1980), writes,

This has always been the problem with Agee’s book: the pictures and the text don’t agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers’ lives. “How can people live like this? How can the rest of us permit it, tolerate it, bear it?” Agee cries. “Don’t listen to him,” the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say. “He exaggerates. He gets carried away. It’s not as bad as he says.”

Malcolm attributes the disparity between the testimony of Evans’s photos and that of Agee’s text to “photography’s inadequacy as a describer of how things are.” She says, “The camera is simply not the supple and powerful instrument of description that the pen is.”

Anthony Lane, in his brilliant “Eye of the Land” (The New Yorker, March 13, 2000; retitled “Walker Evans” in his 2002 collection Nobody’s Perfect), takes a different view. He says, “Agee’s mission succeeds only when it starts to approach the condition of a Walker Evans photograph.” And what is that condition? The best description of it that I’ve read is by John Szarkowski:

Evans’s work seemed at first almost the antithesis of art: It was puritanically economical, precisely measured, frontal, unemotional, dryly textured, insistently factual, qualities that seemed more appropriate to a bookkeepers ledger than to art. But in time it became clear that Evans’s pictures, however laconic in manner, were immensely rich in expressive content. [Looking at Photographs, 1973]

Agee’s prose is the equivalent of unpacked Evans photos – their expressive content spilled across the page in line after line of exquisite description. For example:

The front porch of oak two-by-twelves so hard they still carry a strong piercing fell of splinters; the four supporting posts which have the delicate bias and fluences of young trees and whose surface is close to that of rubbed ivory; in the musculatures of their stripped knots they have the flayed and expert strength of anatomical studies: and the rest of the house entirely of pine, the cheapest of local building material and of this material one of the cheapest grades: in the surfaces of these boards are three qualities of beauty and they are simultaneous, mutually transparent: one is the streaming killed strength of the grain, infinite, talented, and unrepeatable from inch to inch, the florid genius of nature which is incapable of error: one of the close-set transverse arcs, dozens to the foot, which are the shadows of the savage breathings and eatings of the circular saw; little of this lumber has been planed: one is the tone and quality the weather has given it, which is related one way to bone, another to satin, another to unpolished but smooth silver: all these are visible at once, though one or another may be strongly enhanced by degree and direction of light and by degree of humidity: moreover, since the lumber is so cheap, knots are frequent and here and there among the knots the iron-hard bitter red center is lost, and there is, instead, a knothole; the grain near these knots goes into convulsions or ecstasies such as Beethoven’s deafness compelled; and with these knots the planes of the house are badged at random, and again moreover, these wild fugues and floods of grain, which are of the free perfect innocence of nature, are sawn and stripped across into rigid ribbons and by rigid lines and boundaries, in the captive perfect innocence of science, so that these are closely collaborated and inter-involved in every surface: and at points strategic to structure: and regimented by need, and attempting their own symmetries, yet not in perfect line (such is the tortured yet again innocence of men, caught between the pulls of nature and science), the patternings and constellations of the heads of the driven nails: and all these things, set in the twisted and cradling planet, take the benefit of every light and weather which the sky in their part of the world can bestow, this within its terms being subtly unrepeatable and probably infinite, and are qualified as few different structures can be, to make full use of these gifts. By most brief suggestions: in full symmetry of the sun, the surfaces are dazzling silver, the shadows strong as knives and India ink, yet the grain and all detail clear: in slanted light, all slantings and sharpenings of shadow; in smothered light, the aspect of bone, a relic; at night, the balanced masses, patient in the base world; from rain, out of these hues of argent bone the colors of agate, the whole wall, one fabric and mad zebra of quartered minerals and watered silks: and in the sheltered yet open hallway, a granite gray and seeming of nearly granitic hardness, the grain dim, the sawmarks very strong; in the strength of these marks and peculiar sobriety of the color, a look as if there has been a slow and exact substitution of calcium throughout all the substance: within the rooms, the wood holds much nearer its original colors of yellows, reds, and peasant golds drawn deep toward gray, yet glowing quietly through it as the clay world glows through summer.

Wow! Is it too much? All Agee is describing is a crude sharecropper shack. But that’s just the point. In the knots and nails and boards of this poor no-account dwelling, which many might dismiss as an eyesore, Agee sees beauty – “wild fugues and floods of grain,” “the patternings and constellations of the heads of the driven nails,” “shadows strong as knives and India ink,” “argent bone,” “mad zebra of quartered minerals and watered silks”!  

Maybe Malcolm is right; the pen is mightier than the camera. But I don’t think so. Everything Agee describes is enfolded, concentrated in Evans’s photos. (“They do not illustrate so much as distill,” Lane says.) Agee opens them up, filters their subjects through his own vast, acute, photographic sensibility – so sensitive to light, shadow, and texture.

I don’t buy the view that the photos and text of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men disagree. Yes, their styles differ from each other. Evans’s photos are austere; Agee’s prose is lavish. But they both show a reverence for the humble actual. That, to me, is what matters most.