WALKER EVANS:
WORDS AND A DOCUMENTARY CALLING COLLIDE

The late John Berger, in an essay on the artist Martin Noël noted : ‘When words are applied to visual art, both lose precision’. But in the case of Walker Evans and his passion for literature and the printed page, Berger’s discerning remark isn’t exactly watertight.

Walker Evans (1903–1975) the photographer, writer, designer, editor, and tireless journalist is mainly known for his towering and eclectic work in photography. Some of his best works are some of the most instantly recognisable photographs in the history of the medium.

It should be said that Walker Evans’ first ambition was to become a writer, and he never lost the thread, instead finding innovative ways to add writing to his photographic work, particularly in photo-essays. Here is where he left an indelible mark on the grasp art has on popular culture outside the esteemed walls of galleries and museums.

His magazine work has lasting precision because he wasn’t just showcasing his photographic skills. With astounding persistence, he hit back at America and its values, whipping up a counter-culture and commenting on issues related to popular culture. Evans set his own assignments and agenda, often writing, editing and laying out the work with full autonomy.
He was less interested in the cultural power of museums and galleries, and more concerned with the versatility of the illustrated press. Particularly in the fact that popular culture’s audiences were imbued with a reflectiveness that Walker Evans wanted to be apart of. And indeed he never gave up on this pursuit, and used this medium to comment on the consciousness of America at the time.

In 1930 he began photographing in smaller magazines, until he found his place within Time Inc., which owned magazines such as Fortune, Life, Sports Illustrated and Architectural Forum.

Perhaps Walker Evans’ most famous study was Now Let Us Praise Famous Men with the American writer James Agee, concentrating on tenant farmers during the Great Depression. The work transcends the parameters of reportage, concentrating on ordinariness until it becomes divine — a work of art. Only this paring of Evans and Agee came back with a work of art during the time of Roosevelt’s New Deal and widespread wretchedness and poverty.

Evans’ camera documents the families, farms and houses of three sharecroppers in Alabama. The book features portraits, details of rooms and belongings, cotton, menial activities and Sunday singing. All under the pensive and evocative style Walker Evans was celebrated for, a visual sophistication.

The work was commissioned by Fortune magazine and Evans noted that the magazine ‘didn’t really know what role it should play during the depression. They didn’t know what they were doing since they were founded to describe in a stimulating way American business and industry, and that was falling apart.’

It’s said Walker Evans was a photographer of modernity; he photographed America during a time of change and progress.
His essays in magazines were concerned with things beaten by the waves of modernisation — weathered surfaces, architecture, or the quirks of modern design.

Evans admired the writer Charles Baudelaire, who proposed that in order to truly know the times we live in, we must attend the most minor and commonplace things; as opposed to ‘official history’, but things time forgets or brushes aside.

Take his Labour Anonymous series — an ephemeral study comprised of150 photographs detailing Detroit workers.
The work was shot on assignment for Fortune magazine, in its November 1946 issue, under the title ‘On a Saturday Afternoon in Detroit’. Evans found that when shooting this series he was creating ‘the physiognomy of a nation’.
Today it’s viewed as a serial study of the facial and posture of workers. Though the words can be read as a counterpoint to his photographs, deliberately subverting or undermining any straightforward understanding of the work.
Oftentimes Walker Evans’ writings were poetic, polemical, biting, though always sophisticated. Arguably, his exploration of the tension between words and pictures was a forerunner of what was deemed crucial to conceptual artists many years later.