Walker Evans

The average roll of 120 film produces twelve exposures. Over 3,300 of these rolls would be required to produce the 40,000 + prints made by Walker Evans, a twentieth-century photographer from St. Louis. In his article “The Evans File,” Benjamin Lima dissects the books and catalogues that currently compartmentalize and display Evans’ work. Lima feels that, although he is best known for his Depression-era photography, Walker Evans’ talent extends into a multitude of decades and subjects.

In his article, Lima compares the catalogues of Evans’ work against one another. He uses logical arguments to convince readers of his claims. Lima substantiates the Evans’ artistic diversity with information about his photographs’ subjects and settings. These indisputable facts, such as pictures’ dates, locations, and focus, give readers little room to doubt Lima’s claims. To further reinforce his evidence, Lima utilizes phrases such as “this is understandable” and “to emphasize the obvious.” This kind of wording almost makes readers feel dumb if they do not understand and agree with the basis of the claim. Who wants to disagree with the understandable and obvious? With a subjective topic like art, providing an seemingly objective view can really strengthen an argument.

Lima argues that Evans is commonly placed in a 1930’s box, remembered only for his neutral shots of the Depression’s vernacular American landscapes. Some even say that his images “define what Depression-era America looked like” (Vanderlin, 84). However, his subject matter spanned nearly fifty years and handfuls of motifs. Various catalogues compare different themes in Walker’s work. He documented already-frozen subjects such as signs and statues, and also the landscapes of multiple countries, including the US and Cuba. Walker’s photographs didn’t depict a particular kind of person either. There are many photos of poor Americans during the Depression, but Evans worked to broaden the way pictures defined a place or situation but capturing many genders, races, and classes in various settings.

Lima really gives readers insight to Evans’ versatility. Many authors and art critics focus only on Walker’s Great Depression Work from when he was under America’s Farm Security Administration. Articles and books by many art scholars fail to properly recognize other collections of his artwork. The title makes sense of Alan Trachtenberg’s focus on Walker’s US photographs in his book Reading American Photographs; however, his discussion of Evans’ work is limited to Depression-era photos. Evans took American photos throughout the entire twentieth century and depicted far more than poor, rural scenes, but Trachtenberg speaks of nothing outside of the 1930’s and 40’s. Even when authors attempt to discuss Walker’s lesser-known work, they still come back to the Great Depression photographs. Robert Vanderlin of Raritan magazine wrote an article on Evans’ twenty-year stint with Fortune magazine. As much as he tries to address Walker’s corporate photography in the decades following the Depression, Vanderlin frequently returns to, and at many points dwells on, Evans’ most famous work. It apparently is very difficult to separate Walker from his Great Depression depictions.

“The Evans File” makes obvious the wide scope of Walker Evans’ photographic abilities. Catalogues of his work are so diverse that they are better compared to one another than to outside art. Evans’ skill and focus extend to a variety of themes and shooting locations, a fact which is often unrecognized by scholars. Benjamin Lima does an excellent job of doing what other authors do not: looking past Walker’s most famous work from the 1930’s and seeing the true extent of his art.

Image:
Walker Evans, 1935. www.flickr.com/photos/infrogmation/4141588243/

Sources:
Lima, Benjamin. “The Evans File”. Art Journal. 63.3: 102-106. Fall 2004.

Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to
Walker Evans. [New York, N.Y.]: Hill and Wang, 1989. Print.

Vanderlin, Robert J. “Walker Evans at Fortune.” Raritan. 28.3: 81-104. Winter 2009.