Walker Evans, Pt. 4
I didn't know that until a few days ago. Seems like I've got lots of people to rethink, perhaps a bit, as I enter that course in queer theory in the fall. We shall see. I don't like dividing people by their sexual preference.
As with Hart Crane, I don't think her sexuality really factors much into her art. Her project of documenting New York in the 30s, Changing New York, owes much more to her deep friendship with Eugene Atget than it does to her apprenticeship under Man Ray. And there is little doubt that she is the one who introduced Walker Evans to this anomalous figure in the history of photography.
Atget is from a different age, an age where photographers coated their own plates, and were part magician and part showman. He began life as an actor, but when he entered the profession of photography he presented it as an entirely practical form. He hung a sign on his studio which said, “Documents for Artists.” His project was to document a changing Paris, around the turn of the century, before those last vestiges of the nineteenth century faded away. But his photographs are nothing if not artistic. Atget's art comes not from the evocation of a singular vision, but a multiple one. I think that Walker Evans said it best.
He knew where to stand.
John Szarkowski notes the affinity between Atget and Walker Evans well, in his introduction to the MOMA monograph on Atget:
Atget's greatest student—and the photographer who came closest to becoming his artistic successor— was surely Walker Evans.
It seems now that Evans worked his way through Atget's whole iconographical catalogue, save only the parks. Evans did the bedrooms and kitchens, the boutiques, the signs, the wheeled vehicles, the street trades, and the ruins of high ambition. He did not have Versailles, of course, only ruined antebellum plantations, failed banks in the classical idiom, and fragments of stamped tin ornament.
To rework Atget in America required that Evans recognize that he was dealing with a different order of tradition and quality, and this recognition inevitably inflected his work with irony— a condition that seems foreign to Atget's view of the world.
The quality that seems to ring from Atget's work is an impression of stillness, a stillness that was a world apart from the machine frenzy of America. Perhaps we make too much of the irony, and miss the monumental nature common to both their work. It is an epic vision, far more than it is a lyric vision.
Though Evans often claimed in later years that he thought photographs should reach for a lyrical quality, he was uneasy with anything that might be considered romantic. It seems that Szarkowski's words regarding this photograph by Atget might also be applied to Evans.
Atget apparently worked with perfect calm and equanimity on the roughest waterfronts, and in the neighborhoods of the slaughterhouses and tanneries of Paris, but he often seems to be nervous in the zone; in any case his framing and focus seem uncertain, especially when he confronts the people who lived there, who stare at him with an incomprehension that seems to echo his own.
This plate is perhaps atypical of the series; it seems to suggest a degree of empathy between the subject and the photographer that probably distorts the position of both.
This sort of discomfort is easily seen in Evan's early photographs on the New York streets; it seems that people were more like props rather than objects of sympathy. As Szarkowski suggests, I think that the “sympathetic” nature of his later work in the deep south is a distortion, though perhaps a welcome one.
However, what Evans did capture was that same sense of stillness, and history, in his photographs of New York people and shop fronts. Like the people in Atget's photographs, when people appear they seem to be more like props, stylistic devices used to complete the composition rather than objects of vital importance within the photograph.
There is a distance, an aloofness, in Atget which was no doubt formative. While empathy may be involved in Evans' later work, it seems purely secondary to the project of constructing iconic images, images that convey a sense of "great time" in the smaller contexts of day-to-day life. While some of the street photographs convey easily the sense of rushing modernity, this aspect is but a splinter on a route toward a sort of aesthetic purity. It is this sense of purity that Evans seems to have adopted from Eliot, and then fed it through the vision of an itinerant Paris street photographer named Eugene Atget. The resulting synthesis is pure Walker Evans; a visual poet of a uniquely modern sort.
Though Evans was the architect of many fine portraits, they might have easily been road signs. In their weathered faces, a skilled viewer can trace the steps of time. Atget produced an incredible catalogue of artifacts, and perhaps only Walker Evans ever exceeded him in range, because of his deeply architonic portraits. To provide evidence, documents in a shifting world, was the project of both men. Capturing the personalities of people, or even empathizing with them wasn't the point. It was the contour, the shape, and the position against the backdrop of deep time that mattered, not the personal response to a moment, either inside or outside the frame.
[If you just stumbled in, this is a continuing series of posts about Walker Evans. The key posts which preceded this are The Early Photographs, and of course Evans photographs the Brooklyn Bridge, though the Coney Island Photographs are fun too. Soon we'll move on to the really formative stuff, his photographs of Victorian homes.]
I wonder if it's the idea of standing outside the norm, rather than a particular sexual preference, or any other particular difference, that makes an artist more sensitive than the average person. Doesn't it seem, for instance, that at a particular point in history Jews, blacks, or women seemed to rise to the forefront in the arts? And didn't they do so precisely because they were disenfranchised? If we extend the idea a little further, can we judge the validity of an artist's vision by the artist's life? Or does the artwork stand on its own? I used to like to believe that artists should lead a "successful" life if we are to accept their vision of "reality." Lately, though, I'm beginning to question that idea. Do I have to reject Cat Steven's songs, a one-time favorite, for instance, because he believes Rushdie deserves to die for blasphemy? Or are the songs mine once they are out there?