Evans
overextended to fill all the galleries. What it does best is put Evans’ work in context — for the photographer, the subject and the eventual image.
If “commercial photography” is sometimes considered inferior to “art photography,” that’s the way many of Evans’ most famous images were produced. He worked for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration during the Depression of the 1930s, for instance, and on assignment (eventually as an editor) for Fortune magazine.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, he spent a year in Paris in the mid-1920s, and the city was influential in the way he saw streetscapes. Displayed in the exhibit alongside his American street scenes are similar images by French photographer Eugene Atget, another influence.
Evans settled in New York City when he returned, and his early work as a photographer — he’d considered a writing career, as well — fell squarely into “classical modernism,” the exhibit’s text points out. From this period come such iconic, and ironic, images as oddball storefronts and a truck hauling a big sign that spells out “Damaged.”
Although the exhibit’s path is theme to theme, not year to year, the next major section conveys Evans’ time spent with Alabama sharecropper families in the midst of the Depression. The images focus especially on Floyd Burroughs (movie-star handsome, but to what avail?), his wife Allie May and their children.
The close-up portrait “Allie May Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama, 1936” may be Evans’ single most indelible photograph: a plain-looking wife and mother, resolute in the midst of hard times. In a later recorded interview that is included in the exhibit, she recalls she was warned Evans might show her family in a bad light, but she says it couldn’t compare with what they’d already been through. (She was also told that he and writer James Agee might be Russians.)
Agee’s text and Evans’ photographs were published in 1941 as the book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.” One of Evans’ biographers has called it “one of the most intense and sublime photographic essays ever assembled.”
A smaller display, but just as stunning, conveys the muddy streets and rundown houses in an industrial city — not during the Depression, but in 1961. The city is Pittsburgh and the forum for the images, surprisingly, is Fortune magazine. The story is headlined “People and Places in Trouble,” and Evans’ own text conveys many of his subjects over the years: “They speak with their eyes.”
That’s certainly true of Evans’ series of portraits of New York City subway riders, taken surreptitiously with a tiny Contax camera hidden under his overcoat. The images have been described as “a variety of tense, weary or vacant faces,” maybe even more tense given the years they were made, between 1938 and 1941.
The exhibit doesn’t mention the controversy of Evans’ publishing these revealing photos without permission from the subjects. He anticipated the criticism by admitting he was “a penitent spy and an apologetic voyeur.”
Series after series of photographs fill SFMOMA’s galleries and hallways: Cuba in the 1920s, a faded plantation house in Louisiana, the patterns of auto junkyards and fire-ravaged buildings, roadside stands selling everything from catfish to watermelons.
The exhibit’s second half, titled “The Vernacular as Method,” delves into the way Evans approached various subjects, whether precise “portraits” of workshop tools for Fortune or African art for the New York Museum of Modern Art. There’s a section on American main streets drawn from Evans’ collection of 10,000 postcards.
Curator Clement Cheroux planned the exhibit as a complete retrospective of Evans’ work, to show how he elevated everyday, vernacular subjects to the rank of art. But it’s a challenge to absorb 300 photographs and another 100 objects in one visit. The sheer volume, gallery after gallery, can dilute Evans’ power. For museum visitors, it would be a shame if it all becomes a blur.