"The photographic eye of Walker Evans represents much that is best in photography’s past and in its American present. [...] When you see certain sights, certain relics of American civilization, past or present in the countryside or city street, you feel they call for his camera”-
Lincoln Kirstein, American Photographs
As the above quote by the author American Photographs written portions suggests, Walker Evans was known for his tracing of the social and cultural position of America with a camera in hand. Whilst many of his contemporaries in the FSA’s historical section made photographs intertwined with tactile bondage to the immediate state of the nation’s depression, Evans captured a distinct sense of the American vernacular, which transcends the Depression-era all together. Whereas his contemporaries made photographs with a rooted temporal presence in the present moment, Evans’ photographs contextualised America in front of him within the nation’s broader historical canon.
Max Kolzoff notes that a point of separation between Evans and the likes of Lange and Margaret Bourke-White was the latter pair’s emphasis on the “bitterness of the present”. This reasoning is not to say that Evans’ transcendence of his present moment’s mood reflected his total apathy. His apathy was for the immediacy of the contextualisation; If De Creveceour’s Letters from an American Farmer was published at the advent of the 1930s, it would be fair to suppose that Evans read, “What then, is an American, this new man?” and decided to use his camera to answer this. His photograph, Damaged, of a large neon sign in the ‘perpetually modern’ New York, taken at the close of the prosperous decade, serves as an apt preface to this study of his Depression-era material. At the time of shooting in 1928, New York and its technological prowess, stock exchange and flappers had become representative of all things modern in America. This representation was a notion that the Depression soon rendered unfit for purpose. Any retrospective viewing of damage thus involves an element of dramatic irony, as inadvertent as this may have been on Evans’ part. Nonetheless, Evans examined the Depression’s damaging impact on America in an introspective way, not personally but on a national level.
Through his Depression-era work, he takes the focus away from the aesthetics of 1920s modernity to define America in the 1930s, an America new in the temporal sense, experiencing a flux in its culture which lurched towards the past. Evans’ presentation of America in the 1930s better spoke to the fundamental values of American identity; small-town ruralism, the independence of man and religion, and indicated a cultural shift from the 1920s focus on themes of modernity in both artistic expression and general national consciousness. This study will thus examine particular works from his FSA and broader catalogues which best illustrate this whilst acknowledging the disputed nature and purpose of his work by critics such as Tagg and Sekula.
Conceptual subjugation, faith and the pastoral are key tenets in Evans’ photographs from the 1930s. He moved on from his literary education in New York and Paris in the 1920s to have honed a distinct photographic style by the mid-1930s. Evans photographed all things from landscapes to interiors to billboards to portraits. His muse was not a particular physical being or symbol but all compositions that spoke the language of America as he understood it. His style is resoundingly marked as ‘direct’, which is a contentious label, under the guise of this study. The pairing of this essay’s critical investment in more abstract matters of metaphor and cultural aestheticism with the antithetical, critically supported notions of ‘directness’ and ‘realism’, means that it runs the gauntlet of much existent Evans critique. Nonetheless, Kirstein provides an agreeable compromise when he mused, “Evans’ eye is a protestant one”, which follows “Puritan tendencies”. Suppose the difference between Protestantism and Puritanism pertains primarily to levels of personal piety and emphasis on purity within religious practice and theory; we can take Kirstein to be alluding to the fact that whilst Evans’ photographs exist in the broader visual space and, like all else, are ripe for interpretation. However, they attend to strict measures such as Evans’ penchant for direct and precise depiction. If so, in one fell swoop, he can reconcile the arguments of critics such as Tag, who dispute that Evans’ pictures cast allusions to more significant meaning.
With this said, one of Evans’ better-known landscape photographs, Joe’s Auto Graveyard, depicts rural land in Pennsylvania,
where the landscape has been interrupted by discarded and dilapidated automobiles. On a depictive level, Evans organises the frame into a series of horizontal striations, each thematically and texturally contrasting to those bordering it. The varied visual textures emphasise the thematic contrasts. As mentioned earlier, Lewis used cars in his introduction to Only Yesterday as a metaphor for America’s emergent and momentous wave of modernity in the 1920s. Simultaneously, at the fulcrum of this essay’s argument, the aesthetics of the rural and natural landscape of the US represent a cultural link towards past notions of American identity.
Thus in Graveyard, Allen’s symbol of modernity is subjugated thematically by the overpowering presence of the pastoral, which overwhelms it compositionally. Evans emphasises this effect with the difference in light and shadow between the layers, engineered by his precise shooting techniques. Kirstein described Evans as an artist who “forced details into their firmest relief” by utilising “moral values of patience, surgical accuracy and self-effacement”. Here, thanks to his conscious exploitation of abundant sunlight, the automobile third of the photograph is dark;. However, the tone is not constant; shades of grey in varying darkness jaggedly interact and present a vision of ill-harmony to accompany the literal theme of mechanical death and decay. In contrast, the field and sky sections are far less interrupted layers; little variation in tone or texture promotes a view of harmony in these sections. Even the trees seem in place on the horizon, present, without disrupting the natural order of the land as the cars do. Evans here paints the ‘roaring’ and uncontained modernity and excess of the 1920s as a disorganised rupture of the otherwise constant idea of the American self. In other words, the photograph indicts the surge and fall of 1920s modernity. Evans paints it as a force which disrupted the linear ageing of the otherwise harmonic American ideal.
Brooke Blower helps to validate the assumption that this was Evans’ intention in her revised history of the American Lost Generation of the 1920s. She fittingly fashions a narrative out of the cultural sway which did occur and which Evans was close to observing, away from traditional American ideals in the 1920s, before the return in the 1930s, “as the story goes, Americans fled from political commitments during the 1920s by going to Paris only to renew those ties as they renewed their connection with the American soil in the 1930s”. The artistic maturation of Evans occurred amongst his fascination with French and modernist literature; he maintained an avid readership of “cutting-edge literary journals, when fussy Victorian prose was giving way to the lucid and fragmentary language of modern life”. Thus Evans was in a simultaneous cultural step with those writers whom Blowers describes as leaving and reuniting with American soil after the 1920s had ended. Thus it is not farfetched to assume that his composition here is indeed centred on the interruption of traditional American ideals with industrial and economic modernity, which he recognised to have succumbed to collapse in 1929.
In fitting antithesis to the national mood of optimism that smothered the post-war and subsequent economic boom years of the late 1910s into the next decade, death, decay, and varying other pessimistic modes of thought are central concepts in the thematic spine of Evans’ Depression-era work. He listed ‘religion in decay’ whilst mentioning subjects of interest to him in a letter to Earnest Evans in 1934. Curiously, Keneth Bindas notes a general rise in the prominence of traditional religious lexicon around the 1930s, towards which Evans’ was cynical. Bindas argues that the rise was not necessarily religiously driven but rather a secular shift to using grand metaphors of Christianity to acknowledge the seriousness of America’s then predicament. It was a “recognition that a new era and a new way of thinking was necessary to confront the immediacy of the crisis”. Regardless of the specific reason, religion has remained a foundational component of American national identity. The briefest scans of multiple founding political documents can prove this fact (see the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, etc.) . Similar in connotation and tone to Joe’s Auto Graveyard and taken on the same assignment in Pennsylvania, Evans’ photograph of a steel mill from a graveyard site stretches the concept of the previously mentioned photograph to more profound levels. In A Graveyard and Steel Mill in Bethlehem, pessimism and grief are human in form rather than mechanical.
Kirstein writes in American Photographs, “Most industrial photography sings a Wagnerian hymn to the visions of machines as deities. Evans is less concerned with the majesty of machinery than with the psychology, manners and looks of the men who make it work”. Accordingly, Evans poignantly foregrounds the cross headstone, suggestive of death and faith, against the backdrop of housing and factories in the background. His employment of a relatively wide aperture means the background does not fall to obscurity under the prominence of the cross. True, his exposure for bright highlights makes the symbol the photograph’s centre of mass, though the industrial background does not become a mere afterthought. Are we to read this similarly to Joe’s Auto Graveyard, with a historical principle of American identity subjugating a mark of modern times? Or is Evans alternatively alluding to a resurgence of faith within a culture that had been decidedly preoccupied with secular concerns of science and modernity in the last decade? Thanks to the subjective joy of the visual image, interpretations are, of course, infinite.
The crux of Steel Mill’s meaning and value in this particular context is the depictive choices made themselves. In the words of Shore, “Photography is inherently an analytic discipline [...] a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture”. We know Evans was a meticulous composer of photographs. On 1950s road trips, Robert Frank recalled how Evans would stop the car, walk several hundred yards and deem that the sun would be in appropriate alignment for photographing that subject the next day, and return they would as promised. Thus, Evans’ exact intended meaning in Steel Mill renders itself somewhat redundant with respect to the pure thematic contrast presented with the combination of factory and graveyard. Ultimately, Evans presents an America foregrounded by death and religion in the shadow of industry and the economic boom lurking behind. There is purity in how he implores the viewer to consider their stance on the two. As if to say, these two cultural pillars are currently waging a battle within America; whose side are you on?
Particular merits can be gleaned here from the critique of Tag. At the very least, his criticism sparks necessary debate on the relevance of allusion and metaphor within Evans’ photograph, which strove to be honest and objective in its depictions. In his assessment of what he calls ‘Evans’ resistance to meaning’, Tagg withdraws the agency with which Evans scholars previously assumed he held over the transmission of meaning in his photographs. Withdrawing agency from Evans in any respect makes for a contentious argument, given his meticulous deliberation and the sheer complexity and patience of his picture-making process. To Tag, however, Evans’ focus on depicting realism is the reason for his withdrawal, as mentioned above. Doubling down on his assertion, Tagg spares multiple Evans contemporaries, such as Bourke-White, to make ‘resistance to meaning’ a point of distinction between Evans and other members of his photographic school. To Tag, the onus is on the viewer to produce connotations from what Evans depicts. He asserts, “In Evans’ image, meaning is held back”, as if to claim Evans’ subjects are photographed so matter-of-factly that his photographs cannot carry auxiliary meaning themselves; the viewer and their contexts add this. The views of other scholars have bolstered this critique. According to John Szarkowski, “Evans’ unfortunates have not yet learned to lose themselves in their role: they are still individuals and might even be mistaken for someone we know” This takes Tag’s use of ‘meaning’ as to denote the ability of Evans’ photographs to bear symbols within depictions of subjects, a facet this essay argues that they can, given it takes Evans as an artist who made broad comments on America through his compositions and photograph sequencing.
A compromise which narrows down this debate and consolidates the notions of Tagg and Szarkowski argues that Evans’ portraiture work is less effective at transmitting symbolic meaning than his landscape compositions. However, this is not to say that his portraiture carries no message. The political association with liberalism that belonged to much art in the Depression era has been well-documented, as has Evans’ aim to steer his photographs away from close identification with such forces. Nonetheless, his works of city and landscape, such as Steel Mill and his billboard work, indisputably lend themselves to symbolic readings thanks to the emphasis his exposure and compositions place on some aspects within the frame.
The eye of Evans is particularly well suited to studies of this nature, which look to place and locate American culture at a specific time in light of how it pertains to historical trends and iterations. Joseph Ward has noted that within Evans’s sweeping cityscapes, “there is a Hopper-like absence of people that makes the settings seem of a remote past.”, further Kirtstein notes that Evans took photographs of American architecture “with a knowing and hence respectful attitude to explore the consecutive tradition of our primitive monuments.” Evans’ portraiture work indeed withholds meaning to a certain extent. To be more specific, his portraits are direct, taken of Americans in their natural habitats. The photographs of his closer subjects are not of highly generalisable caricatures, as we see in the disappointment of Szarkowski. James Agee noted on the pair’s trip South that he and Evans were unable to find “one family through which the whole of tenantry in that country could be justly represented”. This lack of generalisable portraiture subjects contrasts Evans’ employment of people-less street scenes to make broad comments about the whole of America. For example, the License Photo Studio he used as the opening image to American Photographs. Monica Bravo and Emily Voekler call the choice a ‘meta discursive comment on photography in America’; interpretations abound, though the bottom line remains.
If Evans’ land and city-scapes render themselves more openly polysemous concerning comments on the contemporaneous position of American culture and identity, his stark and decisive portraits of American people require consideration of form and structure to excavate similar interpretations. When appraising American Photographs, Ward corroborates this. He notes that Evans’ photographs of American infrastructure and architecture depict “the cultural artefacts of the urban, small town, and rural America”. To the untrained and disinterested eye, a photograph of somebody’s face will usually struggle to denote anything more than that person’s face immediately. If, taking cues from Sekula, a portrait, like any other photograph, is an ‘utterance’, able to convey half a message, then a landscape or wider-framed image of several people or a street scene will be able to invite interpretation more effectively because there are more visual cues from which the viewer can invite their matrices of context and subjective interpretation.
Evans thus employs structural choices, such as the sequencing of photographs, to pick up this discursive slack. His portrait work in the 1930s similarly intertwined considerations of American identity within the context of the Depression. As Douglas Nickel points out, in American Photographs, captions are spared, and photographs are printed one to a page. Thus, the reader is asked to glean meaning via continuities and thematic arcs across multiple pages. This design choice is a curious one. Stryker once called the photograph “the subsidiary, the little brother of the word”, We also know Sekula’s stance on meaning in photography being only half formed by the photograph itself, so what can the omission of captions here tell us about the position of American thought during the Depression according to Evans?
Presenting his pictures without accompanying captions speaks to the autonomy of the American existence itself, an especially relevant concern within the Depression context. Neglection of the caption means Evans relinquishes the ability to impact the viewer’s perceptions of those depicted in his photographs. Instead, he affords his subjects the paramount opportunity to decide the viewer’s perception of themselves and tell their own story. Looking back on the practice of photojournalism, Stryker lamented that many expect the photograph to tell the whole story. Evans embraces this complaint, allowing his Americans photographed to tell their own stories to as much an extent as he can, in this way harking back to the age-old national concept of the self-made man.
The second half of American Photographs focuses on building exteriors and sweeping cityscapes. The first half is characterised as “people by photography” by Kirstein. Therein, Evans introduces his broad assessment of America he saw in the 1930s with a collage of portraits, interiors, street scenes and photographed billboards. The sequence of photographs leading up to and following the first portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, a cotton tenant farmer’s wife, contributes much contextual information towards the portrait. Her portrait is frank; a tightly cropped frame depicting her from the chest up, standing against a wooden exterior of what presents itself as her tenement. In the upper third of the frame, the line of the wooden plank in line with her eyes runs until her head interrupts the space; from there, Burrough’s eyebrows pick up the same trajectory, giving the impression that the line of the wall is not interrupted by her shape. She almost blends in, soldered to the dwelling behind her, which becomes part of her identity. There is a formal resignation to her expression, non-belligerent at the fact that she appears fused to the hardships of picking cotton for survival.
The photograph is poignant, and Evans duly accentuates all possible interpretations with his sequencing. The photograph on the preceding spread is that of a weathered billboard panel, The illustration is flaking, and the material exhibits a large gash through the centre. The state of neglect suggests the advertisement was erected in a prior time, perhaps of financial prosperity, wherein consumerism was a more practical endeavour. The figures in the illustration display an alarmed expression, most notably glancing away from the next spread. Physically, the book reads as though these eyes are looking away from the next page, away from Burrough’s portrait. Once the viewer is arrested upon turning the page to eyes trained directly towards the lens (Burroughs’), the following image is that of a shabby, domestic interior, with organisational disarray dominating a section of the frame. The only orderly detail, shown in its entirety, is a subtle sign which reads ‘the Lord will provide’. Thus Evans frames his portrait of Burroughs with scraps which denote supplementary meaning. Firstly, the economic climate tuned for consumerism is in disrepair, and it cannot bear to look towards the American of the present moment. All Burroughs has in front of her to count on is the traditional American value of faith. Barthes’ theory of the denotative function of photography consolidates this use of sequencing from Evans. If, as he argues, single photographs are steadfast and pure in their depictions of a single moment in space, “ballasted by the contingency of which it is [...] the real in its indefatigable expression”, then it makes sense for Evans’ to supplement meaning in single photographs with the sequencing of others before and after, in this manner.
Further examples exist to offer this idea external validity. Take, for instance, how Evans bookends his portrait of sharecropper William Edward (Bud) Fields to emphasise the responsibility and position of elevated though precarious importance of the rural man during the Great Depression. Agee and Evans greet readers with roughly 68 pages of uninterrupted photographs before launching Agee’s written account of his time observing and living alongside the three tenant families photographed. The photograph on the preceding page is of Bud’s wife and a child, pictured in front of their housing; their backs turn away from the camera, which gives them a wide berth; auxiliary farm structures stand closer to the camera than the house and frame the pair, creating an optical path between them and their house in the centre of the background. The next page is the close portrait of Bud Fields, which a starkly simple photograph of the Fields’ house follows before a family portrait, emphasising the house’s small size given that there are six mouths to feed within. The prominence of Bud’s portrait within this sequence emphasises his importance as the primary provider for his family, reinforcing traditional gender ideals and the particularly American onus on man being in control of the land he inhabits, fashioning prosperity for himself as far as his industry will take him.
Ultimately, the discourse surrounding Walker Evans must tread a careful line regarding his intentions and the subject of the creation of meaning. The need for care is implied here because explorations and subjective interpretations of his work do well to recognise and accept that Evans himself strove for objective documentation in his photographs. His subway project in the 1940s best illustrates this facet of his approach. The use of a covert camera and craftily hidden shutter release system shows the length and feats of ingenuity Evans manufactured to capture, in his words, “True portraiture”, away from the “calculated veneer of hardness and superficiality” which posed photographs, or any photographs in which the subject was aware of their subject status produced. Thus it is a precarious position to highlight meaning in the work of a photographer who strove to glimpse plain, objective reality on his film. Nonetheless, as this case study has aimed to show, the eye of Evans is still a cultural historian’s best friend. Like the closing line of his fiction work ‘Brooms’, Evans’s photography “sucked the dust out of the chaos” of the Depression era in the United States and left ample documentation from which allusion-minded scholars can make inferences about the time and its cultural leanings. If anything, Evans’ known penchant for objectivity makes the study of his photography more straightforward. In the same way that a plum line will reassure an engineer of the accurate bearing of other lines added to a diagram, the honest spirit with which Evans purported to document America leaves us freer to consider the visual content portrayed and spend less time questioning the reliability of the visual material.