Walker Evans: The Magazine Work

I hadn’t seen all of these wonderful photos by walker Evans until this book came out. His more famous pieces were well known to me, from all the history books and museums. But this book contains the photos he did for magazines, many of them from the Works Progress Administration programs, and they document the nation’s dynamics of the time. His WPA era photos are of Southern sharecroppers, documenting the poverty of the South, but at the same time giving respect to the resilience of the people.

Included in this book are excerpts from Evans’ lectures and writing, full of subliminal advice for other photojournalists. In the chapter “A New Decade” he says “people out of work are not given to talking about the one thing on their minds.” Perhaps the lesson here is that in the Great Depression, the average American didn’t complain as much. It was an era before public assistance, so people didn’t expect anyone else to help out if they were hungry. It was great to have Evans’ own words as a primary source, because I always wanted to know how his attitude towards his own work changed after 30 years.

Walker Evans was a photojournalist, not a fashion photographer, and I think that’s one of the reasons his work is still renowned. When you photograph models for Vogue, your name doesn’t remain on peoples’ minds, because it isn’t about you. The viewer is only interested in the woman in the photo, not the story behind it. But when you do a photo essay, people tend to study it longer, and the story behind the photograph remains on their minds. Evans photographed fashion, but not to sell clothes; he photographed men on their lunch hour, to study how the clothes were worn, and document the “real” fashion.

The combination of Walker Evans photographs along with his writing and lectures on different eras creates a wonderful book. It’s a great way to study American history, particularly the shift from rural to urban (and eventually suburban life.) Included are studies on urban life in the 1950’s, a time when our cities were declining. Evans’ work juxtaposes the towering office buildings of Manhattan with crowded tenements, manicured suburbs, and rough farms. He also documented the slums in London, which I could barely distinguish from the Jacob Riis photographs on the Lower East Side; the apartments were filthy and crowded, and the children were dirty. Somehow the slums look the same no matter where they are.

It’s great to have a book like this to document a photographer’s work. Perhaps we’ll soon have another one like it for Robert Frank, among others?