Volume 45, Number 16 · October 22, 1998
The Eye of Walker Evans
By Luc Sante
BOOKS REFERRED TO IN THIS ARTICLE
Walker Evans: New York 11, 1998
exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, July 28-October
Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection
by Judith Keller
J. Paul Getty Museum, 410 pp., $95.00
Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye
by Gilles Mora, by John T. Hill
Abrams, 368 pp., $75.00
Walker Evans: A Biography
by Belinda Rathbone
Houghton Mifflin, 357 pp., $27.50
Walker Evans: Signs
with an essay by Andrei Codrescu
J. Paul Getty Museum, 69 pp., $19.95
The Last Years of Walker Evans
by Jerry L. Thompson
Thames and Hudson, 127 pp., $24.95
Walker Evans: Havana 1933
by Gilles Mora, by John T. Hill
Pantheon
Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-38 Administration Collection in the Library of Congress
A Catalog of Photographic Prints Available from the Farm Security
Da Capo, unpaginated pp., $18.95
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
by James Agee, by Walker Evans
Houghton Mifflin, 471 pp., $16.95 (paper)
Walker Evans at Work
with an essay by Jerry L. Thompson
Harper and Row
Walker Evans: American Photographs
with an essay by Lincoln Kirstein
Museum of Modern Art, 205 pp., $22.50
The photographs Walker Evans made of the small-town, dirt-farm South in the 1930s for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration and for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his collaboration with James Agee, are definitive and so characteristic that today it might almost seem as if he not only made the pictures but, like a novelist, invented their subjects as well. Conversely, because the pictures are so rigorously plain, you might think that he just got lucky, happened to be there with a lens and a shutter, as if anybody remotely awake in that place at that time could have done the same. But of course there were other photographers working the same beat then, and their pictures don't look much like Evans's. Either they strove for the messages and sentiments and aphorisms that Evans vacuumed from his work, or else they allowed themselves a style. At his peak, Evans possessed a conjurer's genius, shared with certain character actors and a very small number of writers, for making art that appears neither to be art nor to have been consciously made.
Review, 3521 words
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