Jeffrey Meyers

Eye Am a Camera

Walker Evans, Ed. Clément Chéroux, Paris: Centre Pompidou, April 2017, pp. 320, Euros 49.90 (hardcover)

This exhibition takes place at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, AprilAugust 2017, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, September 2017-February 2018.

Walker Evans (1903-75), the Eugène Atget of the Depression, followed the French photographer who documented nineteenth-century Paris. He agreed with Joseph Conrad who wrote in his Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, ‘My task . . . is, before all, to make you see.’ Evans said he was influenced by Baudelaire’s choice of subjects and by Flaubert’s objective treatment and hidden artistry. The critics in this catalogue, who are named but not fully identified, dutifully repeat this statement without noting other realistic influences: the novels of Balzac and Zola. One critic vaguely asserts that Evans influenced the photography of his era, but doesn’t give specific examples.

This exhibition emphasizes a thematic perspective rather than a chronological order. Like Dos Passos’ U.S.A., Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Evans’ work focused on American roots, not on European culture. Most of the critics tediously repeat the word ‘vernacular’—more than thirty times throughout the book—to describe Evans’ fascination with humble subjects. But the six hundred exotic African masks (one with a cowrie shell to suggest a blind eye), photographed for a show at the New York Museum of Modern Art, are neither American nor vernacular.

The critics offer confusing descriptions of Evans’s work. One quotes a 1971 curator of photography who states, ‘It was puritanically economical,

precisely measured, frontal, unemotional, dryly textured, insistently factual.’ He then, in a false analogy, mistakenly compares Evans’s work to the egoism, bravado and baroque elaborations in the poetry of Walt Whitman. Evans is much closer to the austere particularity of William Carlos Williams. This straight-on view of this critic contradicts what another unnamed critic calls his ‘use of high-angle, low-angle and close-up shots, decentering, double exposure and graphic effects.’

Another unresolved contradiction was inherent in Evans himself. In a crucial statement, he wrote of his pessimistic rebellion of the 1930s: ‘I was really anti-American at the time. America was big business and I wanted to escape. It nauseated me. My photography was a semi-conscious reaction against right-thinking and optimism; it was an attack on the establishment’—and on his wealthy father. In the 1930s Evans was also working for Fortune, Henry Luce’s business magazine, which celebrated the glories of capitalism and industry. His aesthetic photos of junk portrayed the detritus of industry. His portraits of sharecroppers, whom he saved from the dustbin of history, were used by the federal government’s Farm Security Administration to justify their well-intentioned but harsh policy. They forcibly relocated poor farmers onto communal land that was supposed to be more suitable for efficient agriculture.

Evans’s subjects, while he was working for the government and for Fortune, were cityscapes in New York, Alabama sharecroppers, corpses in Cuba and an exquisite portrait of a woman he loved. Brooklyn Bridge (1929) illustrated Hart Crane’s poem The Bridge with a low-angle photo of the vast span, cut off at both ends, soaring above the clouds and heading for the New York skyline. Wall Street Windows (1929) has six pairs of matching back windows cut out of a white wall and bisected by a metal staircase that seems to lead to an elevated train. The dynamic abstract design resembles the hard clear lines and rigid squares in Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist painting The Crowd (1915), a visual portrayal of urban conformity and chaos.

In Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931), the principal thoroughfare of this horse-racing resort divides two rows of diagonally

parked, square-hooded cars. The empty glistening wet sidewalk reflects the slim trunks of the leafless trees, anchored in sodden grass, whose branches lean gracefully toward the street and over the sidewalk. This photo echoes Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece, Rue de Paris: Temps de Pluie (1877), in which the umbrellas (like Evans’ trees) cast their shadows on the wet stones. Both works portray the still cool air of a rainy day: its hypnotic calm, pewter tonality and sweep of space as the buildings recede into the distance.

Roadside Stand near Birmingham (1936) captures a lake-fish store in Alabama whose lettering, beneath a painted fish, promises honest weights, square dealings and low prices. Between a display of melons and potatoes, two boys struggle like weightlifters to hold up gigantic gourds. Curious customers stand inside the shadows of the store and a white-clad woman disappears into a distant doorway.

In ‘Who Murdered the Vets?’ (September 1935) Hemingway described the flood following the hurricane that devastated the Florida Keys, and provided the background for Evans’ Negroes in the Lineup for Food at Mealtime in the Camp for Flood Refugees (1937):

They hung on there, in shelter, until the wind and the rising water carried them away. They didn’t let go all at once but only when they could hold on no longer. Then further on you found them high in the trees where the water had swept them.

The broken shoes of the Negro flood refugees, waiting for food in baggy torn trousers, resemble Van Gogh’s famous painting of workmen’s boots. Like a chain gang, these potent symbols of poverty, cut off at the waist, trudge toward oblivion.

Elizabeth Tengle, Hale County, Alabama (1936) portrays a scrawny oldyoung woman, with matted and roughly parted hair, dressed in tattered rags and nervously biting her fingers. Standing before her crumbling cabin, with a mongrel dog slinking behind her and laundry reflected in the

window, she’s trapped in hopelessly wretched poverty. In Floyd and Lucille Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama (1936) the handsome clear-eyed farmer and his beautiful daughter sit with dirty bare feet on the rough boards of their wooden cabin and stare straight at the camera: sensitive, suffering and sad. In the 1960s Allen Ginsberg made their worn, workingman’s biboveralls popular among fashionable hippies.

Corpses play a dominant role at the end of The Great Gatsby and the beginning of Sunset Boulevard, and Evans was fascinated by the corpses he saw in Havana in 1933, his only exotic locale. In Corpse with Sutured Chest the naked dead man, lying on his back with his head resting on a wooden block, displays a series of raised scars from neck to chest— perhaps the result of a stab wound—that look like twisted cloth buttons on a carnival costume. In the even more horrible Corpse with Bloodstained Face the mouth of a once-attractive young boy—the potent symbol of a wasted life—is forced into a grimace and turned toward a slash wound on his right cheek.

In Coal Stevedore, Havana (1933) the young coal-stained miner, wearing a tilted black straw hat that shades his eyes and dangling a white cigarette between his sensual lips, will inevitably lose his jaunty look and soon turn into a hopeless wreck. In Coal Dock Worker (1932) the older man, with grizzled white moustache and beard, seamed face and tattered cap, looks like a human lump of coal and holds two spades on his shoulder like Christ bearing the Cross. Both miners display a expression of pitiful resignation.

Evans’s finest works were inspired by the poverty of the 1930s. But one of his greatest photos and rare close-up portraits, not in this exhibition, is of Lady Caroline Blackwood in 1958. Though in love with the enchanting Caroline, heiress of the Guinness brewery fortune, Evans remained her chaste companion. The fine-boned, waif-like creature—as stunning as Botticelli’s Venus—lies chest down across the thwarts of a rowboat, her head protruding over the bow like a brightly carved figurehead. With flowing hair and head titled slightly to the left, she rests her chin on her joined hands and, seen from above, stares bright-eyed into the lens.