WALKER EVANS: “Scavenging the Landscape – Walker Evans and American Life” (1996)

PH1521 WALKER EVANS: Scavenging the Landscape Walker Evans and American Life (1996)

Scavenging the Landscape: Walker Evans and American life

By Melissa Rachleff, Originally published in Afterimage, Jan-Feb, 1996

The Great American Depression, spanning the 1930s, inscribed into the culture a psychic crisis. Faith in industrial ingenuity, heralded as “progressive,” came unhinged. By 1933, four years after the stock market crash, one quarter of the work force was unemployed.(1) Into this dilemma came a multitude of photographic projects, the most famous of which were sponsored by the federal government in the form of agencies that provided relief to farmers, the unemployed and others. The most completely realized project was the documentation of conditions faced by displaced farmers, recorded by the Historic Section of the Resettlement Administration (RA), later the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The socially-oriented photographic book made its appearance, as did the photographic magazine, best exemplified by Life in 1936. Many of the best known American photographers came to prominence during the Depression, including Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Margaret Bourke-White. Of all the photographers from that era, one represented the quintessential photographic style of the Depression while remaining an elusive figure in photographic history: Walker Evans (1903-1975).

From the vantage point of 1995, Evans’s documentation of the Depression era is axiomatic. His photographs are ubiquitous, both in print and in collections including the United States Library of Congress, which houses his FSA photographs. Surprisingly, until now a full-length biography of Evans has never been undertaken, although his life and photographs have occupied distinguished photographic and cultural historians including John Szarkowski, William Stott, Alan Trachtenberg, and most recently, Jean-Francois Chevrier.(2) The most elusive of the Depression-era photographers, Evans’s personality and method of working set him apart from his contemporaries, his talent and taste emanating from a literary rather than a visual tradition.

The year 1995 marked the publication of two new studies examining Evans’s life and work. The first, Walker Evans: A Biography, by independent photo historian and curator Belinda Rathbone, is written as a general interest biography. The book, the first full-length biography on Evans, exhumes the private aspects of the artist’s life in an attempt to understand his work. Citing the difficulty that prior would-be biographers encountered in Evans’s previously unsettled estate – recently settled and currently housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City – Rathbone’s book makes use of a host of personal documents. As the daughter of Perry Rathbone, the former director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the author was fortunate to have known Evans. Building upon her early impressions of the artist – whom the author characterizes as eccentric and unconventional – she spent five years tracking down and gathering personal reminiscences from more than 100 of Evans’s closest friends and associates. These testimonies form the basis of her understanding of Evans’s character.

The second book, a 400-page catalog, Walker Evans: The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection, written and compiled by Judith Keller, the museum’s associate curator of photography, provides an exhaustive analysis of the museum’s Evans collection. The collection is broad in scope, and Keller’s approach considers the photographs within the socio-cultural and aesthetic discourses spanning Evans’s 50-year career. Much of the work came from photography collector Arnold Crane who purchased over 1000 archival prints from Evans in the 1960s and 1970s (an event documented by Rathbone). Keller organized the collection chronologically into 10 chapters, tracing Evans’s key photographic assignments, each section rich with cultural significance and aesthetic analysis. Keller’s research reveals continuity in the work: throughout his career, Evans pursued particular subject matter, “signage, and other found objects, portraits and architecture,”(3) (although this was not what he photographed exclusively). By basing her analysis on the photographs, Keller allows the images to dictate the character of the study. Although little of Evans’s private life is discussed, Keller renders Evans’s practice within the changing social landscape.

Each author approaches Evans differently – from the intimate remembrances in Rathbone, to historical evidence in Keller. Rathbone is determined to use Evans’s personal behavior to illuminate his artwork. She writes, “It was time for a full-scale biography, to see the whole man in relation to the shape of his life, the balance of his friendships, his manner of working, the objects he admired and collected, his haunts and homes – in short, the full range of his associations.”(4) The central assumption in Walker Evans: A Biography is that the artist was a “genius,” and by delving closely into the minutia of his life, one can comprehend what made Evans “great.” Critical studies in art and culture reveal deeply held biases in terms such as “genius.” Genius is a historical construct, employed to promote a particular aesthetic and ideology over others, whereas Rathbone conceives of genius as transcending historical (material) conditions. The genius of the work, she implies, will be reflected in the person. Keller, conversely, locates Evans’s personality in the photographs themselves. Each book, then, represents two distinct approaches to biographical study. Taken together, the integrity of the artist as found in Keller, and the shortcomings of the person, as found in Rathbone, help the reader locate Evans’s place in photographic history.

BACKGROUND

To better understand the work of Evans it is helpful to examine the larger issues surrounding his practice. Social and cultural historians have examined the dramatic effect the Depression wrought upon the newly emergent middle class: an enormous spiritual anxiety grew as the middle class – unlike the working class and poor for whom economic struggle was an everyday reality – faced the prospect of economic annihilation for the first time. When Franklin Roosevelt proclaimed in his 1933 inaugural address, “there is nothing to fear but fear itself,” he sought to inculcate a spirit of resilience among the middle class. This attempt at a restoration of faith was built upon the concept of an American tradition, the “American Way of Life,” that could overcome the middle class’s belief that it was teetering on oblivion.(5)

PH1958 1994.256.69 WALKER EVANS: Scavenging the Landscape Walker Evans and American Life (1996)

Such cultural anxiety cannot be attributed solely to the Depression. As Keller points out, prior to the Depression there was considerable interest in defining the new century as the “machine age.”(6) Beginning with industrialization during the nineteenth century, the U.S. was transformed into a culture of mobility. Three inventions altered American life forever: the train, the automobile and (in the early twentieth century) the airplane. This new mobility allowed families to disperse across the country while U.S. cities were infused with new populations made up of immigrants from Europe, Eastern Europe and, after the Civil War, from the Caribbean. During the post-slavery era, African Americans began leaving the states of the South for the Northern urban centers, a process accelerated by World War I. Such changes altered the social landscape of the U.S., permeating it with ideas of tradition and permanence requiring continual reinterpretation in order to include (or exclude) the new multiethnic population.

The Depression, however, offered an extreme circumstance in which to test the viability of the new culture America had created. A crisis of this magnitude had been seen only once before in U.S. history, during the Civil War. It should not be surprising, therefore, that a renewed interest in the Civil War occupied artists and writers of the Depression decade. This interest affected the federal government as officials in the Works Progress Administration collected oral histories from former slaves.

In the fall of 1933, Hound & Horn, a journal devoted to the study of contemporary culture begun by Harvard University students, published an article by Charles Flato on Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs. Trachtenburg in his book Reading American Photographs (1989) analyzes the importance of Flato’s article with respect to the discourse surrounding documentary photography of the 1930s. It is useful to examine Trachtenberg’s thesis in that it also reveals the influential role one of the student founders, Lincoln Kirstein, played among writers and artists in articulating a new aesthetic direction during the Depression. Unlike American art of prior decades, some American artists were beginning to reject the predominant European aesthetic. Rejecting modernism, particularly the art of montage, they instead sought to locate an American aesthetic. Kirstein’s inclusion of an article on Brady in a journal about contemporary culture represents an attempt to identify something “American” and to build upon the notion of an American “tradition,” The creation of a cultural legacy functioned as a salvo to a “depressed” nation.

The Brady photographs were of great interest to Kirstein (named after the former President), who referred to himself as a “man of the nineteenth century” and was drawn to the visual artifacts of that century’s devastating war. Body-strewn battle fields aside, Brady’s photography offered an entree into a “living past,” and during the 1930s, Kirstein’s “nineteenth century was indeed alive;”(7) the evidence of which was scattered across the American landscape in buildings, monuments and artifacts.

Flato’s 1933 article, “Matthew B. Brady 1823-1896,” for Hound & Horn did more than recount the photographic project. Written during the reign of high modernism, the article was a paradigm for a new artistic direction that looked inward, not abroad. Conceding that the war photographs were journalistic, Flato determined that they were “not the kind of the newspapers; rather something less ephemeral and of a more profound order, more alike to Charles Baudelaire’s ‘desire to present things as they are’ in the tragic full confluence of individuals and events.” The literary allusion was central to Flato’s article; rather than promoting photography as a fine art, photography was constructed as a language – as a visual text. Brady’s work did not represent “high art” with all of its pretensions, but the mechanical, “objective” scrutiny of the camera eye. Brady’s pictures revealed “the presence of form and order and the deeper meaning of reality in the midst of a world that was becoming increasingly amorphous, confused and seemingly unreal.”(8)

PH1635 WALKER EVANS: Scavenging the Landscape Walker Evans and American Life (1996)

Writing in 1933, Flato could just as easily have been describing the effect of the economic Depression on U.S. culture; certainly his interpretation of the Civil War was filtered through that contemporaneous crisis. But for both Flato and Kirstein, Brady’s photographs offered an important subtext whose significance lay in their evidentiary status, representing not a new tradition, but a lost tradition. Although the article does not mention Alfred Stieglitz, long a central figure in the history of American photography, Kirstein must have been familiar with the former’s role in promoting an “American” photographic aesthetic. Since the late nineteenth century, American photography had been dominated by the Stieglitz crusade for photography’s acceptance as a fine art, promoted through his publication, Camera Work, and his New York galleries, 291 and An American Place. Defining the issues that faced a generation coming of age in the Depression meant not only a rejection of Stieglitz, but also a rejection of the “New Vision,” a dynamic style proliferating in Europe during the inter-war period. Instead, Kirstein articulated a “classic vision,” one that was distinctly American and, as he would later write in Evans’s 1938 book American Photographs, “show[s] us our own moral and economic situation . . . .”(9) Like Roosevelt, Kirstein was aiming for a distinctly American aesthetic that could be seen as a continuation of a past tradition neglected during the mechanical age. Such an aesthetic seemed well-suited to photography. Unlike other ways of making pictures, photographs were capable of describing and reflecting a vision of reality. For Kirstein, photographs were “social documents” that clarified the American cultural landscape, thereby defining the country for its anxious, middle-class citizens. Brady had preserved an American tradition threatened by dissolution, and the U.S. needed a reinscription of cultural legacy.

Americans experienced major social and technological changes in the years following the Civil War. Corresponding technological changes in photography meant advancements in film speed, lenses, electronic flash and introduction of the hand-held 35mm camera. Yet industrialization had not entirely effaced vernacular culture: the American vernacular remained steeped in the idiosyncrasies of region and life, emphasizing a handmade craft. Vestiges of the nineteenth century were scattered across the U.S., waiting to be discovered among relics of the early industrial age. Kirstein sought an artist with romantic and social sensibilities to define U.S. culture, an aesthetic combination traced not to fine art, but literature. He sought an American artist in the traditions of Marcel Proust, Gustave Flaubert and Baudelaire, with the literary modernism of James Joyce. This vision – a straddling of two eras – Kirstein found in the photographs of Evans.

CHILDHOOD

Evans was born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri. His father, Walker Evans II, was an advertising executive whose chief talent lay in copywriting the slogans promoting the growing array of American products. As a by-product of the mechanical age, advertising was a relatively new cultural phenomenon at the turn of the century. Mass production of goods increased with the rise of the middle class and advertising functioned to explain to this new audience the benefits of pre-packaged products. Bruce Barton, a persuasive advertising executive who combined the evangelical with the colloquial, proselytized the inculcation of an “American Way of Life,” an ethos based upon faith in the incorporation of U.S. businesses and increased productivity in manufacturing. In this burgeoning field Evans’s father became a disciple of persuasion,(10) but as his success grew, he became more estranged from the family. Evans’s relationship with his father contained profound disappointment, accruing in a lasting bitterness towards his father’s profession.

Evans’s mother, Jessie Crane, was raised in a well-to-do St. Louis family, and her aspirations for social advancement matched her husband’s. But, according to Rathbone, she remained dissatisfied and emotionally distant throughout Evans’s childhood. In 1908 the family moved to Kenilworth, Illinois, an affluent and exclusive neighborhood outside of Chicago. Although Evans’s relationship with his mother was strained, he enjoyed the tranquil surroundings of Kenilworth. In 1916, when he was 13, this comfort and stability was disrupted when the family moved to Toledo, Ohio. The move caused a tremendous psychic trauma for Evans who felt literally “wrenched from idyllic Kenilworth,” into an alien world from which he felt estranged. Toledo represented an industrial city, with a multifarious population, a far cry from the genteel homogeneity of Kenilworth.(11)

Evans suffered a second emotional upheaval during his youth when, in 1918, his father abandoned the family for another woman. The desertion was compounded by the fact that the woman was a neighbor, with children of her own, recently separated from her husband. Both the move and his father’s strange living arrangement (for a time he lived next door to his family) was a shock from which Evans never seemed to recover. Although Rathbone does not make a direct connection, she implies that these formative experiences were later manifested in his life-long financial insecurity, a mirroring of the emotional instability he experienced as a child. Significantly, it was during this difficult period that he received his first camera, a Kodak “Brownie.”

Evans’s earliest use of the camera was to catch people unaware, like a spy, as he wandered the streets of Toledo. Keller points out that he often adopted the posture of a covert photographer. Some of his finest portraits were made capturing people unaware – in Cuba, on commercial assignments and in his subway work of the late 1930s and 1940s, taken with a hidden camera. After that initial burst of activity as a teenager, Evans dropped photography for a time. Following several disastrous years in prep-schools (at Loomis Institute, Connecticut; Mercersburg Academy, Pennsylvania; Phillips Academy, Andover Massachusetts; and one year at Williams College in Massachusetts where he became familiar with avant-garde literary journals and the writings of James Joyce), he rejected formal education altogether. In 1924 he moved to New York City, where his mother and sister had settled.

For two years Evans worked a variety of clerical jobs in the city. In the spring of 1926, with financial assistance from his father, he went to Paris with aspirations of becoming a writer. In Paris, Evans sought out the American ex-patriot community that included Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, T. S. Eliot, Man Ray and Abbott. Evans was a persona non grata among such luminaries, “a nobody.”(12) Although Rathbone breezes past this assertion, it is important to note how Evans transmuted this (second) rejection into a renewed interest in U.S. culture. The first indication of this was Evans’s association with the poet Hart Crane upon his return to New York. He met Crane while photographing the city with his roommate, Paul Grotz. Through Crane, he met a new circle of literati that included Hound & Horn contributors Kirstein, Thomas Mabry (who later became the executive director of the Museum of Modern Art) and Muriel Draper, whose home served as a salon. The introduction proved fruitful: four of Evans’s photographs were published in the Fall 1930 issue of Hound & Horn. Although three of the images, Washday, Port of New York and Traffic are abstract experimentations in the European avant-garde tradition, one photograph, Sixth Avenue, a portrait of an African American woman in a fur-collared coat, reflects the sensibility associated with Evans’s later work. In the image, the woman is framed straight on, and the details of her surroundings are dearly defined. Evans did not reduce the picture frame to patterns of light and dark as he had in other photographs. Instead, a “reality” is present beyond the boundary of the figure. It is this journalistic form of “reality” that lends the photograph the narrative content that later led to the harbinger “documentary-style” aesthetic. Sixth Avenue visually represented a break from European modernism of that period, privileging instead a measured, direct approach that carefully constructed a particular moment and locale. It offered a new, untrammeled vista replete with cultural possibilities. Sixth Avenue indexed New York City and for the Hound & Horn represented America.

Rathbone isolates three main influences on Evans’s early work: Paul Strand, Crane and Kirstein. Rathbone turns to previous accounts to describe Evans’s first encounter with Strand’s photographs. Upon Evans’s return from Paris, one of his first forays of a photographic nature was to examine all issues of Camera Work. Evans was unimpressed with everything but the last transitional issue of 1917, when Stieglitz turned the journal’s publication over to Strand. Unlike most of the photographs that had been reproduced in the first 14 years of the publication, Strand’s work exemplified a “straight” aesthetic. Evans later wrote of the impact Strand’s famous Blind Woman (1917) on the streets of New York had upon him, proclaiming, “‘That’s the stuff. That’s the thing to do.’”(13) The inclusion of the woman’s crudely written sign proclaiming “blind” startled Evans into thinking about the medium’s possibilities in documenting the details and incongruities of everyday life.

Crane influenced Evans’s thinking on photography by sharing his creative process with Evans while writing his epic poem “The Bridge,” a meditation on the Brooklyn Bridge. Crane was fascinated by the hidden details in the city and Evans sought similar subject matter. Several of Evans’s photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge were reproduced with the poem’s first publication, a significant merging of photographs and text within a literary genre still unusual for the time. Of Kirstein, Evans’s third major influence, it has been noted that a reintroduction to the aesthetics of nineteenth-century reportage photography was offered as an alternative to European modernism.

Common to these influences was an abiding interest in a vernacular culture, the architecture and details of a landscape that idiosyncratically described the U.S. This became the central theme of Evans’s photography as supported by both Keller and Rathbone, who dispel the labeling of Evans as a “socially concerned” photographer. Whatever Evans’s personal beliefs were about the social conditions brought on by the Depression, he did not use photography as a crusading practice. Although he worked for the FSA, a”propaganda arm” of the government, he insisted on an autonomy of subject matter and style. This distance from a sociopolitical ideology led fellow photographer Lange to claim that Evans’s photographs contained a “bitter edge.”(14)`

Although Evans’s earliest work is centered around New York City, he found his most enduring subjects in the Depression-ridden countryside. Neither Rathbone nor Keller portray Evans’s FSA period as a rejection of the city as subject matter. Rather, each outlines the objectives of the FSA photo projects as the impetus that led photographers further afield. The urban landscape had fallen into disfavor among artists and photographers as it came to represent a more European interest in movement and modernity, best expressed by montage. The country conversely held the vestiges of a living American past, best realized by the “straight” view of the camera. Kirstein’s influence is apparent in the shift from an urban to a rural sensibility.

Rathbone illustrates this point by describing a trip Evans took in 1931 to study Victorian vernacular architecture with Kirstein and the poet and architect John Brooks Wheelwright.(15) Although indebted to Kirstein for the assignment, Evans bristled at the younger man’s conceit and knowledge. Kirstein and Wheelwright were comfortable in their role as cultural arbiters, which Evans associated with their Harvard and Eastern backgrounds. Class difference did not separate Evans from his chosen associations: economically he had many of the same advantages as his new-found friends. But his embrace of an East Coast cultural elitism, of which he could never be a full member, made him reliant upon Kirstein’s aesthetic discourse. Years later Evans recalled the manifestation of such a contradiction through his artistic insecurity on that trip: one of his most important photographs, taken from a Saratoga Springs hotel room after a rain storm, was made on Kirstein’s suggestion. Rathbone describes this photograph as a turning point in Evans’s creative growth allowing him to write, in the fall of 1931, a treatise on his own photographic objectives. “[T]here is a difference between a quaint evocation of the past,” stated Evans in Hound & Horn, “and an open window looking straight down a stack of decades.”(16) The “open window” offered a glimpse of the glistening uniformity in a row of automobiles, each one identical, stretching endlessly back into the picture frame. The statement also reflects what he learned from Kirstein by reinscribing theory into photography. Within a straight, “artless” approach, U.S. life could be isolated and represented. His photographs, many taken with a view camera, referenced the “artless” approach of Brady.

Although Wheelwright’s book was never published, Kirstein accepted the task of publishing Evans’s photographs in Hound & Horn, and helped to get them exhibited. The photographs were exhibited on three different occasions: as part of a three-person New York show at the John Becker Gallery, co- directed by Mabry in 1931; alongside photographs by George Platt Lynes at the Julian Levy Gallery in 1932; and at the Museum of Modern Art’s 1933 exhibition “Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth Century Houses,” organized by Kirstein. Evans was included in other exhibitions in the early 1930s. Julian Levy, known for his interest in surrealist art, saw in Evans’s work the “accidental poetry” of real life, a theme of surrealist art and literature, and included him in an international photography exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1932. That year also marked the representation of “Modern Photography” at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, a traveling exhibit originally organized by Kirstein for the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art in 1930. Through these early experiments and exhibitions, Evans defined his subject matter while establishing a career as a photographer.

Rathbone, to her credit, introduces a discussion of Evans’s sexuality in an attempt to better understand his documentary approach (particularly with regard to portraiture). Many of Evans’s closest male friends were actively bisexual or homosexual, and Rathbone cites a brief (and hilarious) sexual encounter the artist had with the writer John Cheever. Although Rathbone does not contextualize the issue of sexual identity, since the nineteenth century there had been an open homoerotic discourse among a “bachelor subculture.”

The term “bachelor subculture” derives from the turn-of-the-century Penny Press accounts of male sporting events, particularly boxing, which were replete with celebrations of the male body. (This subculture intrigued Crane, and Rathbone chronicles his pleasure-seeking rambles in male after-hours clubs throughout New York City.) Among the arbiters of Victorianism who found this subculture highly offensive, a contrary ideology developed known as Muscular Christianity, seeking a more respectable, and codified athletic male identity. Acceptable behavior and gendered roles were being re-defined and challenged. Although erotic male culture existed among both the upper class and working class, terms such as homosexual and bisexual have contemporary connotations and would not have been employed by Evans. Rathbone’s inclusion of his homosexual encounters and attractions however, lends his portraiture, particularly photographs of Kirstein, Grotz and later of James Agee, a retrospective and significant eroticism.

THE FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION AND JAMES AGEE

Before evans began his well-known stint as an FSA photographer, his first extensive photographic assignment was a book project. Arranged by an acquaintance, Ernestine Evans, a literary agent for J. P. Lippincott, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba in 1932 to create the photographs for journalist Carleton Beals’s book The Crime of Cuba. Working independently, Evans roamed Havana and its outlying areas seeking not so much to expose the evils of the Machado regime, as to reveal the social panorama of the country. The autonomy he demanded allowed him to approach his Cuban work not as an illustrative component of the book, but as a distinct statement relating to, but functioning independently of the text. In this way, he sought to reveal Cuba’s multi-faceted culture: dirt-encrusted dock workers are shown beside a gambler in a white suit leaning against a newsstand. He also documented posters and advertisements revealing the presence of U.S. commercial interests. Keller points out that Cuba became Evans’s Paris – a place to discover his artistic vision. The breadth of subject matter led Keller to remark on the similarity between Evans’s view of Havana and his later perspective on the American South.(17)

“I am beginning to understand what sort of period we are living in,” Evans wrote to his friend, artist Hanns Skolle, in 1932. “I know now is the time for picture books,” he postulated to Ernestine Evans who aided in his 1935 assignment as one of the first photographers for the propaganda department of the newly formed Resettlement Administration (RA). In accepting the position, he proclaimed that he would not “make photographic statements for the government or do photographic chores for the government or anyone in government, no matter how powerful.” After over five years of building his career as a photographer, Evans felt that the chief merit in the government’s project “lies in the record itself which in the long run will prove an intelligent and farsighted thing to have done.”(18) In accepting the position of assistant specialist in information for the Resettlement Administration, he wanted to work independently, without shooting according to preconceived plans, and with the flexibility to allow for his visual interests to develop within the Depression’s social landscape. Before a system for filing the photographs was conceived, RA officials followed the advice of Ben Shahn (another FSA photographer and Evans’s friend) on themes and subjects to cover that could best represent America.

Evans’s career with the government lasted under two years (between 1935 and 1937), yet he devoted himself entirely to the production of his vision. He scoured the American landscape, particularly the South where many RA projects were underway, recording pathos, contradictions and social ordering – the facts of American existence in the 1930s. The photographs of this period are ingrained with a developed cultural understanding of the Depression, marked by the iconography of the billboards, handmade roadside notices and advertisements that proliferated throughout America. The photographs seem to point out the uselessness of his father’s profession and the ironic contradictions between the life promised in the ads and the devastated towns. Evans’s framing of deteriorated posters, hand-painted signs and interior spaces of the country offer evidence of a culture obsessed with material production. One of his most celebrated photographs was taken during this period from the vantage point of a cemetery overlooking Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Eloquently representing the conditions of the local steel workers’ lives, the photograph suggests that the towns soul, as represented by a cross in the foreground, was seemingly uncompromised by big business. This narrative quality in Evans’s photographs, as in literature, encourages multiple readings. In reconjuring “the record itself,” or a pictorial document without self-conscious expressiveness, he echoes Flato. The “‘desire to present things as they are’ [Baudelaire] in the tragic full confluence of individuals and events . . . fashion[ing] a record and a commentary that . . . knows no friend, no enemy, but only seeks to be honest.”(19) His photographs of the American landscape, unlike those of his fellow photographers, had less to do with social commitment to a New Deal ideology than with fulfilling an artistic role prescribed by Flato and Kirstein.

Evans had an uneasy relationship with the government: as an artist he resisted (as he had with Kirstein) instructions on what to photograph. Further, he had little respect for Roy Stryker, the head of the RA, whose home-spun homilies grated upon his sophisticated sensibilities. Yet, the RA represented steady income in venues that he found less abhorrent than advertising. Because of the high quality of Evans’s work, Stryker endured his demands and unpredictability.

Around that time Evans met the young writer James Agee through mutual friends. Agee, also a Harvard graduate, wrote for Henry Luce’s Fortune, founded in 1930 as an opulent magazine for American industrialists and staffed by creative, often left-wing, writers and editors. Rathbone points out the irony of a magazine devoted to American business run by radicals, but two conditions made that possible. For one, during the Depression many talented writers had little choice of employment, unlike a decade earlier, when more patrons sponsored writers’ careers. Advances from publishers for new writing became scarce, and the nation’s most creative and innovative voices worked instead for commercial magazines that, like the movie industry, offered a steady income within a stratified system. The second reason was Luce’s belief that creative writers made more lively and exciting copy. Agee and many other artists, however, found the editorial style and content of Luce’s publications stifling. (As a student at Harvard, Agee created a lampoon issue of another Luce publication, Time that curiously became one of the reasons Luce hired him.) Meeting deadlines and keeping articles within an editorial format exacted a price on the creative energy and spirit of many artists during the Depression. Evans and Agee shared a common bond in that both simultaneously relied on and resented having to earn a living.

Agee admired Evans. He wrote in 1939 to his close friend Father Flye about “The sort of difficult and uncompromising living my friend Walker Evans has been doing the past twelve years as a photographer or ‘artist’ who will not sell out as such of his work or life.”(20) Writing this, Agee reflected the struggle writers and artists faced in cultivating an independent vision. Commercial venues were reluctant to find validity in new and “difficult” ideas, preferring a formulaic structure already proven as profitable. The Depression did not suppress independent voices, but economic hardship took its toll on artists.

Evans and Agee’s trip to Alabama in the summer of 1936 is a part of the lore of the Depression era: what was supposed to be a 15-day trip evolved into a two-month stay to thoroughly document the lives of three cotton tenant families. Although Fortune considered the subject of tenant farmers in the South part of their routine assignments on the effects of the Depression, Agee and Evans (on leave from the RA) transformed the subject into an epic. Before they met the families Burroughs, Tingle and Fields, Agee wrote: “Feel terrific responsibility toward story; considerable doubts of my ability to bring it off, considerable more of Fortune’s ultimate willingness to use it.”(21) Fortune may have wanted an article, but they set artists, not journalists, to the task.

Upon his return to New York in the fall Evans devoted himself to printing and organizing the results of the trip, that were to become his Alabama albums. Dividing the pictures into categories, three for each of the families and one devoted to the countryside and city, Evans made two loose-leaf albums. What is notable in this effort was his conception of photographs as sequential statements. He intended the Alabama photographs to be read sequentially. As Rathbone pointed out, “each picture was but a part of the whole and . . . in their cumulative effect the viewer would come closest to feeling the reality of the subjects’ circumstances.”(22) This approach impressed Stryker, who insisted the “Alabama albums” be preserved intact.

Agee had a more difficult time organizing his material. That fall he submitted a first draft (some 80 pages) to Fortune editor Russell Davenport, who rejected the draft. Fortune never published the article. Agee labored over the writing for five years. “I will work for money only when I have to have it and think security and solidarity and respect for those hopeless and murderous traps and delusions,” he wrote to Flye, citing the economic pressures that confined him and he found partly to blame for the slow progress in writing.(23) At one point Evans secured Agee a home in New Jersey where he worked sporadically on the book. After a publishing deal with Harper’s fell through, Agee’s prolific text was finally published by Houghton Mifflin. The title was changed from Three Tenant Families to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a reflection of Agee’s Presbyterian upbringing. Published in 1941, a few months before Pearl Harbor, the book fell victim to the country’s shifting mood, as growing conflict in Europe escalated into World War II.

Eclipsed when it was published, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is now the Depression Era’s most celebrated text. It did not aspire to social, scientific and political polemics and popularizing techniques, but consisted of a highly personal account of lives shaped by the land and by poverty. Both Evans and Agee, keenly aware of their roles as outsiders, felt alienated even within their chosen milieu and addressed this distance in their documentation. The book was arranged into two sections of photographs and text. As with The Crime of Cuba, Evans did not illustrate Agee’s text, but rather “co-authored” the work with his images. Evans’s photographs appear at the beginning of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and Rathbone adopts this strategy in her biography to separate Evans’s art photography from the family portraits in the book’s center. Although abbreviated from the extensive Alabama albums, the arrangement of photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men captures the rhythm, pace and relationships of each family and provides a personal and documentary glimpse into the everyday lives of tenant farmers. The apparent stillness of the interiors reflects Evans’s and Agee’s voyeuristic and scientific investigations of the empty homes. Images of a broken chair against a wall, a worn pair of boots and eating utensils hanging from a wooden slab in the wall speak volumes about the worn and difficult existence on tenant farms. The photographs manage to preserve the subjects’ dignity, and often the portraits of the families appear collaborative, in some cases Evans dutifully recording what was requested. The book was not as overly reductive or empathetic of the subjects as some other works of the time.

AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS

The arrangement of the photographs for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men led Evans to conceive of another book-oriented project to coincide with his 1938 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that eventually became American Photographs. Evans enlisted Kirstein’s assistance with the design of the book and exhibition. More secure about his artistic vision, he took advantage of his friend’s astute eye to organize the photographs sequentially and narratively. Kirstein, who had traveled to Europe (to collaborate with George Ballanchine to establish an American ballet company) was probably aware of contemporary European uses of montage. Rathbone assesses the makers of American Photographs as such: “They believed in the power of montage – the message that was not literal, but that was given voice by the juxtaposition of objects.”(24) It seems odd to label Evans’s ideas on photographic narrative as montage, as his pictorial style emphasizes a direct gaze; the author overstates Evans’s objective in calling his work “montage,” despite the fact that each print is given breadth not as an individual idea, but as part of a whole.

American Photographs is divided into two sections. The first examines people and places across the American landscape: an image of a torn movie poster depicting a woman’s face is followed by the Alabama images of Allie Mae Burroughs. Evans’s sequencing implies that interior spaces can reveal the incongruities of culture: ads are used to cover cracks in walls, offering structural protection from weather. Ambivalence is accorded to American industry. Main Street Saratoga is set off against “Main Street” Alabama. The second part of the book is devoted to architectural studies. Although Southern plantations are featured, the buildings are not meant to be distinguished by style or grandeur, and the close examination of detail seems to imply that distinctions of class and conditions are less significant. The book is a poetic description of the American landscape in which photographs are intended to be read in the same manner as the pages of a book. Kirstein’s accompanying essay (appearing at the end) introduces a literary discourse to assist the deciphering of the photographs. By calling the book American Photographs Evans and Kirstein include a reference to all photographs by proclaiming them as representative of an American tradition.

FORTUNE

Keller and Rathbone both seek to untangle Evans’s work from the myth of the photographer as defined by Kirstein. It is difficult to pinpoint Evans’s development as an artist because, in many accounts including Rathbone’s, he appears to have stepped into Kirstein’s prescribed role. Kirstein defined Evans as an artist, but with little discussion of his artistic growth and technique. Although contemporary studies of Evans’s photographs, particularly Keller’s, yield new information to expand photographic scholarship, interest in Evans has primarily focused on his Depression-era photographs. That emphasis often excludes his professional association with Fortune magazine.

Critical thinking on commercial art often pits art in opposition to commerce, a paradigm that renders artist and artwork as the subjects of compromise. Yet earlier in the century artists were often given flexibility and latitude to employ a signature style in the commercial product. Evans’s tenure at Fortune followed this latter construction and warrants a closer examination.(25) Aside from Walker Evans At Work, a book published by the artist’s estate in 1982 (seven years after his death), little writing has focused on that period of his life – a glaring omission. Keller’s book is able to bridge a wide gap in the understanding of his commercial work.

Rathbone ends her survey of Evans with American Photographs, recording his life thereafter as a dissolution from a high point of artistic achievement to a rather esoteric quest for recognition and stature. Nonetheless, she provides important biographical data for this period in his life, and read concurrent with Keller’s chapter, “At Fortune,” the context of his thinking in undertaking editorial projects is better understood. During the War, Evans (then married to Jane Ninas, his lover of many years), worked as a book reviewer for Time. He seemed to enjoy his stint as a writer, perhaps living out the suppressed dream of his youth. After the War he was hired as the photography editor at Fortune, where he created monthly photographic investigations through the use of his own or found photographs focusing on changes in the American “landscape.” With Harry Truman as president, new housing was built for the returning veterans in new suburban developments outside the city. Suddenly, as it must have appeared to those on the cultural vanguard, the ethos of social responsibility exemplified by the New Deal was transplanted by a renewed confidence in American capitalism. Compounding such changes, the left found itself in disfavor under the new administration, while the Cold War dictated the direction of foreign relations.

Such cultural shifts are not discussed in Rathbone’s book; rather she focuses on how Evans acted out-of-step with the times by his more personal and inward examinations with photography during this time. Keller alludes to these changes by suggesting that Evans’s turned “inward” during his work on his subway series, a project representing an understandable response to the attacks against artists and writers during the McCarthy era. According to Rathbone, cultural tensions were expressed in his growing estrangement from his wife, and as he became enamored with wealth and power through his associations at Fortune, he was, according to Rathbone “terrified of nameless, emasculating sources.”(26) This fear parallelled a male, postwar anxiety as women in the popular media were often constructed as threatening agents to male autonomy; women had entered the work-force during the war and successfully performed tasks previously considered masculine. Returning veterans, whose life in combat offered extreme and exhilarating conditions, were reluctant to accept the situation. New technologies led to the promotion of a new materialism – an idea that would have been shocking a decade earlier. Popular books and films reflected these fears. Hollywood Film Noir portrayed men straddled between the lure of the “femme fatal” and domestic entrapment.

In this new world Evans tried to maintain a sense of control. As already noted, his resentment that he needed to work for a living is well documented in Rathbone. Although his tenure at Fortune (1945-1965) did not approach the torturous levels of Agee’s experience, witnessing Agee’s struggle may have led Evans to dismiss the work produced while photographic editor there and the popular success of photojournalism in magazines such as Life and Look. These magazines reflected the cultural vanguard, and were especially influential to a new generation of photographers. As such there is an incredible imbalance in scholarship surrounding Evans, focusing on a period of fewer than 10 years, while ignoring a body of work created over 20 years. Rathbone does not discuss his work at Fortune in any depth, reinforcing the misconception that the job was a sinecure. This is unfortunate, as a serious discussion of his Fortune work could have offered a balance to the portrait of a disturbed and frustrated man that Rathbone renders. Keller examines the few examples from Fortune in the Getty collection, but the best source for this period remains Lesley K. Baier’s 1977 essay and exhibition for Wellesley College Museum called “Walker Evans at Fortune.”

Evans’s Fortune projects reflected his intensifying interest in the discarded object. While Kirstein approached the landscape with a preservationist eye, Evans was interested in the aesthetic possibilities of juxtaposing the past with the present. In several photo essays he recorded specific objects that were becoming increasingly anachronistic in the era of mass production, such as steam engines and vintage office furniture, and photographed buildings slated for demolition that he titled, “Before They Disappear.” He wrote the copy for his photo essays, this time adding language to the image and allowing for poetic intercedes within the confines of the job. Unlike most photo editors, he was accorded free reign to produce and publish whatever he found compelling and his autonomy garnered resentment among the staff who saw him as a dilettante rather than an editor. Nonetheless, Evans produced more work for Fortune than is generally realized, work that also embodied the tension arising from the Cold War period as America became a world leader in the global community. Taken together, Fortune published 416 of his photographs. The topics he selected represent a continuation of investigations into the modern vernacular first discovered in his documentary photographs. To some, Evans’s interest in these topics might have seemed nostalgic. Upon further consideration, they may represent his interest in the effects of current cultural transition.(27)

The last chapters of Rathbone chronicle Evans’s growing ambivalence concerning his role as a photographer, and focus on his personal struggles. His financial insecurities led him to make illogically extravagant purchases, exacerbating his difficulties. By the late 1950s, his first wife, Jane, had left him, and he responded by retrenching further into himself, acquiring the eccentric habit of collecting detritus and hoarding objects. A turn of events occurred in the mid-1960s when, on the invitation of Alvin Eisenman at Yale University, he was asked to conduct lectures in the photography department, and in 1965 he was offered a regular lectureship enabling him to quit Fortune. He and his new wife, Isabelle Boeschenstein, left their crowded New York apartment and moved to Connecticut. A new generation was emerging and with that a new-found interest in the Depression-era. The Museum of Modern Art’s new curator, John Szarkowski, “rediscovered” Evans’s Depression photographs and in 1971 organized a retrospective, adding a new interpretation of the work. Rather than group them thematically to build upon the narrative content and make comparisons to literature, Szarkowski presented the work chronologically as a method of tracing artistic development. To Rathbone, the retrospective offers a more equitable denouement to a life’s work.

CONCLUSION

It is a difficult task to separate the myth from the reality when a subject is accorded such grandiose proportions. It is crucial to interpret the cultural conditions surrounding such a legacy. Keller ably culls through the Getty’s enormous collection, tracing Evans’s stylistic patterns and artistic vision within the broader schema of American history and culture. It is a cultural understanding that is lacking in Rathbone. Rather than attempting to decipher oral histories and private documents, she presents the impressions of her sources as fact, and in so doing, she discounts the multiple narratives that may surround a body of work, making Walker Evans: A Biography a myopic search for genius.

Still, it is difficult to explain what makes an artist “great.” In a recent column in The Nation Arthur Danto wrote: “No biography of a great artist can explain the greatness. And if one can infer the character from the work, nothing in the character would have enabled one to infer the greatness of the art.”(28) Rathbone assigns herself a task that seldom offers a satisfying conclusion, for what do we know of artists? Like anyone, an artist can be selfish, self-serving and irascible; others can be generous, nurturing and agreeable. Such traits alone cannot explain what make the artist significant, or what makes their work “great.”

Conversely, Keller does not address the personal details of Evans’s life, focusing instead exclusively on the work. Her attention to detail, including discoveries in archival stamps, photo assignments, printing techniques, original layout, variant cropping, and of course, the visual evidence of these insights in the plethora of reproductions common to “coffee table” catalogs, makes the study a testament to Evans’s photography and ideas. Further, in placing the work and ideas within larger historical issues, the significance of his singular vision is made manifest. The “genius,” if you will, lies in the work, not in the man.

Rathbone appears to disapprove of Evans for not behaving above the lesser human attributes. Interwoven throughout her text, Rathbone negatively points to instances where he acted as if the world owed him a living. “He felt himself to be an aristocrat and he believed in the persistence of culture and cultural distinction which the rich made possible,” she asserts toward the end.(29) Certainly this is not an appealing portrait, but given his pioneering work, he can certainly be allowed some slack for his bitterness. One only need imagine producing an entirely new genre – Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – only to have a commercial editorship waiting at middle-age. This is not to justify Evans’s mistreatment of others, particularly his wives who endured the brunt of his anger. A more interesting use of the personal anecdotes would have been to contextualize the information into the larger schema of the Depression and post-War period. The artist remains an enigma in Rathbone, located neither in his work nor his time.

Evans was a difficult person, and there is thus difficulty in untangling him as a subject apart from his work. Although Rathbone elects to jettison the interpretive in favor of a journalistic narrative, she demonstrates the central role of Kirstein, Mabry, Shahn and Agee, among others, who enabled and inspired Evans to pursue his art. Keller does not show the interdynamics of his personal relationships, placing less emphasis on the role of these important influences. We are left with two distinct interpretations of his life. Each reinforces what the other lacks, though taken together the books-offer the most complete portrait of him to date.

Wisely, Evans did not work with an appointed spokesperson to write the “official” biography. Instead, he left a body of work that most clearly represents his own vision of the “American Way of Life.” Both books will lead photo historians and the general public to a better understanding of his life and will serve as useful guides for future scholars negotiating his milieu.

NOTES

1. Robert S. McElvaine, The Great Depression: America 1929-1941, (New York: New York Times Books, 1984), p. 134. The lame-duck months of the Hoover administration before Roosevelt became President contributed to the worsening conditions that peaked in 1933.
2. See John Szarkowski, Walker Evans, (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1971); William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973); Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989); Jean-Francois Chevrier,”Duel Reading” in Walker Evans and Dan Graham, (Rotterdam: Witte de Witte, 1992).
3. Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection, (Malibu, CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), p. x.
4. Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography, (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995), p. xv.
5. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1973), p. 192.
6. Keller cites Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic Ocean in 1924 as the key figure for Evans upon his return from Paris in 1927. Keller, pp. 10-14.
7. Nicholas Jenkins, ed., By With To & From: A Lincoln Kirstein Reader, (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1991), pp. 20-24.
8. Charles Flato,”Matthew B. Brady 1823-1896,” Hound & Horn Vol. 8, no. 1 (October-December 1933), pp. 35-41. Other writers have pointed out Flato’s erroneous account in crediting all the Civil War photographs to Brady. Throughout his career, Brady routinely employed other photographers (notably Timothy O’Sullivan) to work under the Brady moniker. This inaccuracy does not obscure the larger point I am extrapolating from Flato’s article.
9. Lincoln Kirstein, “Photographs of America: Walker Evans,” in Walker Evans, American Photographs, 3rd rev. ed., (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988), p. 192.
10. Susman, pp. 122-149.
11. Rathbone, pp. 10-12.
12. Ibid, p. 27.
13. Ibid, p. 39.
14. Ibid, p. 111.
15. Rathbone identifies Wheelwright as an architect, pp. 64-65. Keller identities him as a socialist poet whose father was a prominent Boston architect, p. 10. Rathbone provides more of a discussion on Wheelwright and I have elected to trust her scholarship on his profession.
16. Rathbone, p. 69.
17. Keller, pp. 59-102.
18. Jerry Thompson and John T. Hill, eds., Walker Evans at Work, (New York: Harper and Row, 1982) pp. 74, 98, 112.
19. Flato, pp. 37, 38.
20. James Agee, Letters of James Agee to Father Flye, (New York: George Braziller, 1962), p. 114.
21. Agee, p. 92. (letter dated June 18, 1936)
22. Rathbone, p. 142.
23. Agee, p. 97. (letter dated November 26, 1937)
24. Rathbone, p. 160.
25. Lesley K. Baler, “Walker Evans At Fortune,” (Wellesley, MA: Wellesley Museum of Art, 1977).
26. Rathbone, p. 216.
27. Baier, p. 14; Thompson and Hill, p. 6.
28. Arthur Danto,”Lovers and Enemies,” The Nation Vol. 261, no. 10 (October 2, 1995), p. 357.
29. Rathbone, p. 269.