American Photography;
a Document or an Art form?
Walker
Evans, 1903 – 1975
Walker Evans began photographing in 1927, using a small handheld
camera. He soon started to specialize in street life, viewing
buildings, roadsides, and the people of cities, town and villages.
His images focuses in on a subject, and research how it is changed
and perceived by being photographs. A complex technique that mange to
approach a subject while at the same time keeping it at a distance.
His documentary perception was inspired by the french photographer
Eugène
Atget, who he admired for his poetic dimensions of the images that
celebrated an era that Atget knew was doomed. Through Atgets work
Evans learned how the things people make are immensely evocative to
whom they are attached - everything is its own.
Sharecoppers
work shoes , New York, 1929
The
difference of Evans is that he is portending to give you the facts,
but for most parts he is by the choice of the facts influencing how
you understand it.
Evans
is best know for the work he did for the FSA ( Farm security
administration) as an information specialist, where he was assigned
to represent the small-town life and ease the depression in rural
america. Evans first concern with this work was photographing in the
context of any ideology which he refused; “This
is pure record, not propaganda”1
Alabama
Tenant Farmer wife, 1936.
Evans
wanted to show what was there and during his assignment in Hale
county he made most of his photographs in and around the four-room
cabin of Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs. The family owned nothing -
not their home, land, mule, or farm tools, all of which they leased
from their landlord.
The
honesty of the situation Evans tries to capture by studying Allie Mea
up close. The encounter does not show who these people lived, but it
becomes an intense scene between the subject and the photographer,
that respects and equalize them both. The roughness of the picture
and the expression in her eyes tells us about her worries and her
life with out telling us, but the forwardness in the picture is
deceptive for by saying less it forces the subject to reveal
everything. “The
value, and if you like, even the propaganda value for the government
lies in the record itself, which in the long run will prove an
intelligent and farsighted thing to have done. NO POLITICS
WHATEVER.”1
Evans
worked with little concern for the ideological agenda and tried to
distill the essence of the American life to the simple and ordinary.
Doing his employment at FSA (1935-1938) he contrived to keep his
employers relatively happy, but foremost he took advantage of the
opportunity to perfect his photographic techniques. “Very
often I´m doing one thing when I´m thought to be doing something
else.”2
Kitchen
corner, Tenant Farmhouse,1936.
Photographic
documentation focuses on two things; 1, to deliver the truth, and 2,
to act as a social agent making life better. Evans would recent both
ideas, but kept calling his photos a document aesthetics to state
that documentary images looks like the fact but is not objective.
This would be a thorn in the eye of FSA, revealing their propaganda
scheme in a radical and bold artistic move. Much of Evans photos are
therefor not the fact, it only looks objective. He would rearranging
the scenes in order to elevated simple objects to iconic symbols, and
by the simplicity in the scenes he would represented american life
through his own persona.
Evans
assembled his material for the exhibition and book “American
photography” in 1938,
where he showed the best of his photographs since 1928. He loathed
the idea of art as a unique peace, and the intention of his pictures,
most importantly, therefor exist as a collection of statements. They
are thought to be seen together and presented as a consisting
attitude. He was able to show how fare he had gone beyond the
documentary traditions and many of the images in American
Photography
are characterized by erosion, chaos, neglect, or dilapidation, and
should be read in its historic scenery.
2 Walker
Evans The Hungry Eye, by Thames & Hudsom, p. 132
3 Walker
Evans The Hungry Eye, by Thames & Hudsom, p. 132
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