 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 p… WALKER EVANS: “Scavenging the Landscape – Walker Evans and American Life” (1996)  Gay Burke, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, October 28, 1973 By Jane Tormey, Afterimage, July 1, 2003 During the last two years of his life Walker Evans took nearly 1000 portraits of friends and students using an SX-70 Polaroid camera in a peculiarly impulsive and uncontrolled way. This body of work constitutes a noticeable departure from the work for which Evans is best known and respected, and introduces an apparently alternative direction. It is signif… WALKER EVANS: “Walker Evans’s ‘Counter-Aesthetic’” (2003)  By Leo Rubinfien, Art in America, December 2000 A traveling retrospective (2000) prompts the author to recall the austere formalist–and often mordant “self-made well-bred man”–behind the conventional image of Walker Evans as an empathetic social documentarian. Few artists are more candid about their esteem for their predecessors than Garry Winogrand was about his for Walker Evans. Evans had shown him that photographs c… WALKER EVANS: “The Poetry of Plain Seeing” (2000)  San Francisco, 1956 By Tod Papageorge The purpose of this monograph is to describe the influence of Walker Evans’ American Photographs (1938) on The Americans (1959) of Robert Frank. To do this, the photographs in the two books have been edited and yoked together in a series of comparisons. What follows, then, is an exercise in speculation, one born of love and respect. It is offered as a working idea rather than an assured truth, a reasoned p… WALKER EVANS & ROBERT FRANK: “Walker Evans and Robert Frank – An Essay on Influence by Tod Papageorge” (1981) |
