Houghton Mifflin
reviews by Ron Hogan
Houghton Mifflin
reviews by Ron Hogan
Walker Evans is best known for his collaborative work with author James Agee, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men, a series of photographs of Depression-era Appalachian sharecropping families. The power of his work lies in his calculated efforts to appear uncalculated. Evans was dedicated to using the camera to photograph things as they really were; convinced that the details of the image would speak more eloquently than any contrived artistic statement could. At the same time, he would often spend hours or even days in front of a location, waiting for the one second in which to take that perfect shot. Belinda Rathbone, a historian of photography and exhibition organizer, has written the first full-length biography of Evans, exploring the personality and life that Evans hid behind his work.
Although Evans' most famous work deals with the lower classes, he himself was from a reasonably well-off family, attending the Andover Academy and Williams College, though he would drop out to live in New York and, briefly, Paris. He was well-read, keeping up with the work of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce. Among the first published appearances of his photographs were shots of the Brooklyn Bridge that were used to illustrate Hart Crane's epic avant-garde poem, The Bridge, in 1930. Walker Evans' work for the federal Resettlement Administration, which eventually led to his partnership with Agee, came about primarily due to his contacts in the Greenwich Village art world who had already joined the government team. Rathbone devotes more than half the book to this early career, showing how Evans' previous photographic work in locales like 1930s Cuba led up to the trip through Appalachia, and the frustrating process of completing the book (largely due to Agee's obsessive perfectionism). She examines the technical aspects of Evans' work with sensitivity and detail, noting how much of the power of his imagery depended upon the unique methods and materials he used to develop his negatives, as well as on his precise techniques behind the camera.
Once the Depression ends, however, Rathbone hurries through the rest of Evans' life at breakneck pace. In part, this is because some of his work simply isn't as exciting; there is not much to be said about his film reviews for Time, or his years as a staff photographer for Fortune. The book does pick up in its depiction of Evans' last decade; his marriage to a woman less than half his age, his years teaching photography at Yale's School of Graphic Design, and the somewhat tragic circumstances under which, near the end of his life, the photographer sold his entire collection (prints and negatives) for a total of $150,000.
The biographical details are laid out in a very dry, professional tone. Even when recounting Evans' sexual adventures (fleeting experiments with homosexual activity, and numerous affairs with married women), Rathbone never takes a sensationalist tone. This does not make for particularly exciting reading, but the controlled manner in which she chronicles Evans' life is a useful addition to the history of 20th century photography.
