Walker Evans, Subway Passengers, 1938 |
Even for those of us who are not Walker Evans fans, it’s
difficult to dispute the importance of his work. However, his influence on
the development of photography as art and documentary in the twentieth century
is so great that there’s a risk visitors will find the current exhibition at
the Centre Pompidou predictable. So much of what Evans did with the medium has
become household, to the point where it’s as though many of his inventions are
no longer his. Yet, there is still much to gain from a visit to this huge exhibition.
The exhibition text claims that Evans wanted to find
an identity of America through his camera lens. Certainly, his images cannot be
divorced from Depression-era America, even if there are elements of
international modernism at work in them. It’s interesting to think about what
that image of America is, particularly, as it is so clearly driven by
capitalism as it was developing in the first half of the twentieth century. Evans’
focus on advertising, shop signage, window displays, objects and of course,
poverty as its fall out represent the substance of his vision of America. Even though he clearly chose to photograph the everyday people,
I’m not sure that Evans' sole impetus was to draw a very political image of
America. Because his interest in form, structure, and replication says as much
about the photograph as medium as it does about the thing being represented. Surely, the social and ideological critique is just one element of his life's work?
Walker Evans, Floyd Burroughs, cotton sharecropper, 1935/36 |
Nevertheless, the photographs still have a strong political and social
message. Now Let us Praise Famous Men,
Evans project with James Agee in the Depression-ridden American South includes
perhaps some of his best known images. Their exposure of American poverty as the
flip side of modernity was acclaimed at the time in the 1930s. For me,
there’s something shocking about the same photographs today. Namely, their
resonance a century later when American poverty might look different, but it is
as crushing as it was following the great depression. Seeing Evans’ photographs
again reminded me that even though American artists have been exposing these
injustices for 100 years, the country (by which I mean those in charge)
continues to ignore the unrelenting divide between rich and poor.
I did have a couple of problems with the exhibition, and the
first was the display of Allie Mae Burrough’s photograph in a room of its own at the midway mark. Given Evans’ use of photography to represent everyday
life, his emphasis on repetition, on the published photograph as one of
thousands, placing a single image in a shrine-like
display so that viewers can bestow adulation on it as if it were the Mona Lisa seems to disrespect everything
about the photograph. This is a curatorial choice that reinforces the arbitrary
iconic value of a single image over the thousands he produced, and thus,
panders to, rather than extends, popular conceptions of art. I found it to be
an extremely odd decision.
Secondly, while there is much to learn from the exhibition,
particularly thanks to the sheer number of photographs on display, there could
have been more transparency with regard to Evans’ process. To give an example:
in arguably his most exciting and apparently most aleatory photographs, Evans
took hundreds of photographs on the New York subway with a hidden camera for a
project, again with James Agee, Many are
Called. The 1930s photographs are striking for their raw and “honest” depictions
of faces unaware of being photographed. The assumption is that because they are
depicted unknowingly, their guard is down and, similarly, the photograph itself
is “unmanipulated.” It is true that the photographs are touching and intimate, offering
a peek inside the inner life of the subjects on the other side of the subway
car. However, the exhibition makes no mention of the fact that Evans very
heavily edited the photographs in production. What we see are far from the “fly
on the wall” images that might otherwise be assumed.
These flaws aside, together with the sometimes frustrating
oscillation between chronological and thematic presentation of the work, as I
say, it's a lovely exhibition. Evans’ meticulous and obsessive focus is made
apparent through the groupings, particularly of photos of wooden houses, street
signs, and portraits. That is, through the repetition across images and from
theme to theme, visitors can easily identify the photographer’s concerns. In
addition, because of its documentary nature, despite the huge number of
photographs on display, Evans’ work is easy to look at, and the passage through
the exhibition is relatively smooth. I also enjoyed seeing the way his photography
consciously took the vernacular focus of documentary photography and made it
into art, again something that is revealed across obsessive repetitions from
theme to theme and photo to photo. And lastly, even for those who think that they
have seen these photographs before, Evans’
analogue images yield much more in the flesh. Thanks to the cameras he used and his production process, the
images don’t have the slickness or size of those of most art photographers
working today. This gives them a delicacy and an intimacy that cannot be
reproduced in books.
No comments:
Post a Comment