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Walker Evans
by
James R. Mellow,
Hilton Kramer (Introduction)
3.88 · Rating details · 52 ratings · 6 reviews
The Depression Era photographs of Walker Evans (1903-1975) remain some of the most indelible and iconic images in the American consciousness. James R. Mellow's landmark biography of Evans-the first to make use of all his diaries, letters, work logs, and contact sheets-shows that Evans was not the social propagandist that many presume, but rather a fastidious observer, recording, simply, the way things were. Walker Evans is not only one of the most finely wrought portraits of a major American artist ever, it is also a fascinating cultural history of America in the 1930s and '40s. (less)
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Paperback, 656 pages
Published October 11th 2001 by Basic Books (first published 1999)
Original Title
Walker Evans
Aug 03, 2018Mikey B. rated it really liked it
Shelves: photography, united-states, biography
This is the life story of American photographer Walker Evans. He was a photographer who shunned celebrity and photos of celebrities. He went, to play on the words of Robert Frost, for the less common photographs. He took photos of ordinary people – from tenant farmers in the Deep South to commuters in the New York subway. His landscape photos were not of spectacular scenes.
His parents supported him when he went to Paris in the 1920’s. He had aspirations of being a writer – but upon returning to the United States he drifted into freelance photography. He landed a job with one of the Roosevelt New Deal programs to take photos across the U.S. (it should be noted that many artists were encouraged and supported by the government). Later he landed a job with Fortune magazine which he kept for over 25 years.
The author died before the completion of his book, so we only get a summary of the life of Walker Evans from 1957 to 1975.
I particularly enjoyed the many photographs and the commentaries on them.
BUT many aspects irritated me about the writer.
There were many meandering digressions from the main topic, namely the life and photographs of Walker Evans. For example, he goes on and on about James Agee, a friend of Walker Evans. There are too many excerpts from the rejected “novels” of Walker Evans. It is obvious why these were not published.
We are constantly getting a lot of name-dropping. Was it necessary to be told the names of all attendees at a party, a dinner, a picnic...It is like the author is trying to impress us with “look at who I know”.
The author tends to disparage other photographers like Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Margaret Bourke-White.
There was more than a hint of misogyny. Was it necessary to describe a woman in one photo as “fat”?
It was annoying for the author to have a lengthy discussion of a photo and not have it in the book.
This book needed an editor and should have been condensed. I give it 4 stars for the wonderful photos. The writing was 3 stars (or less). An end blurb calls the author “a supreme stylist and a master of biographical portraiture”. No.
To see more photos of Walker Evans
https://www.google.ca/search?q=walker... (less)
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Jul 27, 2017Davy rated it it was amazing
Shelves: art-photography, biography
This is a phenomenal biography -- readable, insightful, touching without being too subjective. Which is important, because let's be honest: Walker Evans doesn't sound like the most likable dude ever. But he took great pictures, and he invented an entire world of photography that we're still taking advantage of and trying to figure out. Mellow was incredible writer and researcher, and the worst thing about this book -- and it's a doozy -- is that he didn't live to finish it. What we get is Walker Evans's life up to about 1956, shortly after he met and began working with Robert Frank. He was in his early 50s. On the one hand, this is mostly ok because he'd done all his really important work already. On the other hand, it sucks for me, because I'd really been looking forward to a full recounting of Evans's relationship with William Christenberry -- the Southern painter, sculptor, and photographer -- who is a favorite artist of mine. That meeting happened in 1961, I believe, so we didn't quite get there. It is a further disappointment that the editors neglected to mention Christenberry in the appendix (which includes some of Mellow's notes for the unfinished part of the book). Mellow has written about Christenberry's work before, and I can't imagine he intended to leave their relationship -- which was almost as important for Walker Evans as it was for the younger Christenberry -- entirely out of this book. Anyhow, you can't blame Mellow for any of that, and honestly, it's a testament to what he did finish that the thing was published in its incomplete form. If you're interested in photography, particularly photography in America, you can't pass this up. It is essential reading. (less)
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Dec 08, 2008Stephanie Griffin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: favorites
WALKER EVANS, written by James R. Mellow, is the biography of the brilliant American photographer who captured the country in black and white stills, starting in the 1920s.
Mellow’s comprehensive 654 pages traces Evans’ life from birth in 1903 through 1955, where Mellow’s text abruptly ends. This is due to the untimely death of the author. A year-by-year summary of Evans’ life from 1957-1975 taken from Mellow’s notes follows, along with a list of footnotes, a ten-page list of credits for the included photos, a brief chronology, selected bibliography, and an index.
Walker Evans was a contemporary of Berenice Abbott, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Margaret Bourke-White, and Ansel Adams (whom he did not admire), and he seemed to be acquainted with just about everyone in the artistic elite circle of the day, whether they be photographers, writers, or painters. From drinking with Ernest Hemingway in Havana, to collaborating with poet/writer James Agee for LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, his life was always intertwined with the who’s-who.
Having first aspired to be a writer, Evans left lots of notes, lists, and correspondence from which to extract the story of his life, and Mellow uses them to fine effect.
With Evans’ classic book, AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS, being reissued in early 2009, now is a good time to learn about the man behind the camera.
I’m keeping this book! It is a great resource!
~Stephanie (less)
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Dec 06, 2008JBP rated it liked it
Shelves: read-in-2008
This is a 2/3 finished biography (Mellow died before he finished it) of one of my favorite photographers--Walker Evans. While I enjoyed it, I was hoping for way more discussion of Evans philosophy on photography or critical analysis of his style/work. There's lots of details on where and when Evans took photos but less of the technical aspects I was hoping for. I'll have to search out other Evans books for that as this was more of a straight up biography. Lots of photos included throughout the text. (less)
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As James R. Mellow's posthumous biography shows, Walker Evans's vision was brilliantly all-encompassing.
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By NICHOLAS FOX WEBER
 WALKER EVANS By James R. Mellow. Illustrated. 654 pp. New York: Basic Books. $40.  |
used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn't need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.'' This was how the photographer Walker Evans approached his art. The tone and content of his declaration encapsulate the astute but cryptic viewpoint with which Evans emerges in ''Walker Evans,'' published posthumously by the fine cultural biographer James R. Mellow, who died in 1997. Evans comes across as possessed by a brave and all-encompassing vision; like his work, he was straightforward, decisive and highly intelligent. He is also shown to have been cold and dismissive, an almost frightening combination of the brazen and the unanalytical.
Evans photographed Manhattan construction sites, Tahitian beaches, workers in Havana, American neo-Gothic architecture, gas stations in West Virginia, barber shops in Mississippi, tenant farmers in Alabama, flood refugees in Arkansas, New York subway riders and a range of other subjects that documented American life, urban and rural, affluent and impoverished, starting in the mid-1920's. He made his best-known images in the Depression but continued taking pictures -- many of which appeared in Fortune magazine -- almost until his death in 1975 at the age of 71. He was one of the rare human souls perpetually open to seeing and able to push back the boundaries of what was acceptable. His scope was inclusive, but he was discriminating. Receptive to everything, he was also forever making judgments. The first photographer to have a solo retrospective at a major American museum -- his 1933 show at the Museum of Modern Art -- Evans created images that were visually and technically impeccable, and truly evocative of their myriad themes. Carl Van Vechten rightly declared that ''if everything in American civilization were destroyed except Walker Evans's photographs, they could tell us a good deal about American life.'' Eleanor Roosevelt voiced much the same sentiment, writing in one of her My Day columns that Evans's work ''shows us contemporary America, and I think all of us who care about our country will be deeply interested in this record.''
What is harder to figure out is how Evans felt about the America and its inhabitants he captured. Regarding that issue, Mellow -- like Evans with his camera -- does not comment on his subject so much as focus carefully, present the information and let us come to our own conclusions.
Mellow zeroes in on the pictures and describes their achievement with both poignant accuracy and critical flair. Even when the work is not reproduced, it comes vividly to mind, with sharply elegant summations like ''a photo of a decrepit Ford with a door off and a rubber tire missing, stationed like a pilgrimage shrine on a journey not completed.'' A picture that ''shows a man and a woman clutching each other against some impending menace'' in front of a ''ravaged poster . . . plastered over with torn banners . . . taken in the early phases of the Great Depression . . . is an announcement of ephemerality: the ephemerality of the American Dream, of American advertising, of circuses and movies -- the whole host of disillusionments swept up by economic reality.'' How refreshing to read a commentator on art who evokes both what something looks like and, without malarkey, what it signifies.
And in his clear way Mellow conveys Evans's considerable complexity. He presents Evans and his art as exemplifying traits and effects summed up by the photographer's primary supporter -- the indefatigable editor, writer, curator and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein -- who mounted exhibitions of the work, wrote a pivotal book about it and brought it to the attention of the larger world. To Kirstein, Evans's work was provocative, the man frustrating. Kirstein was Evans's opposite in his intense emotional engagement and delicious loss of control as he delved beneath surfaces. In a prose style as personal as Evans's was objective, Kirstein wrote:
''Exerting a kind of small but concentrated animal magnetism, he somehow seemed to allow his small size to lead him into the exaggerations of a strutting compensation. . . . His jealousy or irritation manifests itself after the initial impulse by a long interval. His self-consciousness and localized egotism I found so difficult to put up with that I knew I must be affected pretty subjectively.''
 ©Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| Walker Evans, "Torn Movie Poster," 1931. Slide Show courtesy of Walker Evans |
Evans's harshness peaked in relation to his own family. Of a reunion with his mother's relatives, he wrote a friend: ''I got an immediate impression of false teeth, dandruff, adenoids, varicose veins and halitosis of the eardrums. . . . How fatal it has been that all the women have ruled the men right out of their masculinity, independence, courage, will and at last, brains even.'' His bitterness knew no bounds; when divorcing his wife, Jane, Evans wrote her, ''From now on I will consider you dead.''
Was Walker Evans one of those people who could show sympathy only for anonymous strangers? Or was he, like many other highly intelligent people, simply unable to avoid twisting the knife? Mellow provides no answers here, but his apparently deliberate decision to follow Evans's example and present rather than comment seems the right one. After all, no adjectives Mellow might have mustered could be as telling as Evans's own remarks.
Of course we do not know what Mellow might have done if he had lived long enough to complete this book. Would he have given his own assessment of the man he researched so carefully but met only once -- on an occasion when Evans's alcoholism dominated their encounter? Would he have worked with his editor to clear up certain problems in the text -- the introduction of characters without adequate explanation of who they are; confusion about Evans's high school education in Toledo, Ohio, at the New England preparatory schools Loomis and Andover and at Mercersburg Academy in Philadelphia, with no precise elucidation of the sequence or why he attended all of them? Would Mellow have eliminated occasional inconsistencies, like the way he calls his subject Evans through most of the text but Walker for just a few pages? Or was that intentional, since the use of Walker coincides with what must be the photographer's most human moment in the entire text -- a rare display of emotion when Evans cries at the sight of Jane in an evening gown? These shortcomings aside, Augie Capaccio, Mellow's partner, and Don Fehr, his editor, are to be congratulated for producing this unfinished book and providing a chronology of the last 18 years of Evans's life; Mellow died before completing the final chapters.
The result includes fascinating cameos of some of the most imaginative, energetic and courageous forces in 20th-century American culture. The intersection of creative lives is forever exciting, and through Evans we encounter, among others, the poet Ezra Pound, the saloniste Muriel Draper, the painters Ben Shahn, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, the critic Dwight Macdonald, the art critic Clement Greenberg, John Cheever as a struggling young book reviewer, the photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Berenice Abbott and Jay Leyda, the publisher Henry Luce and the writers Edmund Wilson and Ernest Hemingway (on whom Mellow is particularly adept). Looming larger are the ever-original Kirstein and Evans's brilliant collaborator on ''Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,'' James Agee -- from whom Mellow provides judicious quotations that lead him to the marvelous conclusion, ''Among hard-nosed social documentarians, Agee is a rank sensualist.''
What makes these portraits fascinating is that Evans knew these people when they were hard-working, hard-living professionals, not icons. Sometimes we sense that he treated the people in his life the same way as the subjects of his photographs -- they were there, so there they were -- but even if Evans's sentiments were harsh or inaccessible, the scope of his lens was never in doubt.
Nicholas Fox Weber's ''Balthus: A Biography'' will be published in October.
===
CHAPTER ONE
Walker Evans
By JAMES R. MELLOW
Basic Books
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School Years
Walker Evans III, as he sometimes jauntily referred to himself, was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 3, 1903. His father Walker Evans, Jr., an advertising man, had married the lively Jessie Beach Crane in St. Louis on January 15, 1900. The Evans family, according to an unidentified three-page typed genealogical tree in the Walker Evans archive, traced the family roots back to a John Laurence, born in Wisset, England, early in the seventeenth century, who later settled in Watertown, Massachusetts. The Laurence family line married into a succession of venerable New England families: Tarbells and Shedds and Haddens and Fullers. A Levi Laurence, born in Thetford, Vermont, on August 14, 1759, served for three years in the Revolutionary War and later became a deacon and lay preacher of the Baptist Church in Thetford. It was Levi's daughter, Mary Anne, born August 17, 1809, in Thetford, who married (in 1833 in St. Louis, Missouri) an Augustus Heaslip Evans, of an uncertain birth date, born in Woodstock, Virginia.
There the family line becomes a bit confused in the unknown genealogist's research. The first Walker Evans, the photographer's grandfather, born May 29, 1844, in St. Louis, marries an Amanda Brooks, originally of Mexico, Missouri, on December 4, 1844, and December 4, 1877, in St. Louis. That their son Walker Evans, Jr., is listed as having been born on January 29, 1876, in Mexico, Missouri, a year or so before their marriage compounds the problem. Another complication is the notation that the photographer's sister, Jane Beach Evans (born January 5, 1902), attended the couple's fiftieth wedding anniversary in 1937 rather than 1927. And the notation for Walker Evans III incorrectly gives his birthdate as March 3, 1903, rather than November 3. There is also a pointed notation: "has no children."
Perhaps it matters little in the life of the photographer, except that his mother, Jessie Beach Crane Evans, set some store on family connections. Judging from early family photographs of the Evanses and Cranes, it was a convivial family of aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, of family visits and outings. A wedding photo of Walker's mother shows her, dainty slipper peeking forth from her lacy wedding gown and her head tilted to one side, with a coy beguiling smile. A photograph of Walker Evans's father taken the same year, 1900, shows him as dapper in a neatly tailored suit and vest, with pince-nez and smoothly parted hair. Another shows the father playing a guitar with a broad grin, while Jessie, leaning back on a slipcovered divan at what might be the Evans's family homestead, Fern Valley, near St. Louis, is looking thoroughly appreciative. There is, too, a picture of the young marrieds on a sailing expedition with family or friends, a perfect expression of turn-of-the-century life and pleasure, with Jessie staring knowingly at the photographer while her husband, seated on the deck, leans against her knees.
It was in the nature of Walker Evans Jr.'s profession that the family moved a good deal and that the children's education was a chequered affair. Walker and his sister, Jane, attended a kindergarten in Kenilworth, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago. From grade school, when he was about eight, he would recall, somewhat vaguely, a pair of teachers—sisters who "were very sympathetic and good women. They were wonderful."
He claimed that he had been an apt pupil "until I discovered the choice of being bad and not doing well. But I was naïve. Maybe at the age of eight I was a star pupil, because I loved it. And I loved the teacher. But when I lost interest I became a very poor student," he admitted.
His defection must have occurred later at about the age of twelve or thirteen, when he was in the seventh grade of the Fuller School in Toledo, Ohio. Walker's father had been given the account for Willys Overland, the automobile manufacturer: "That was a big thing. That was why he had to move there. He couldn't turn it down." There is a postcard view of his classmates: the boys of the "class of room 15," posed in shirts and ties and cardigan sweaters or more fashionable Norfolk jackets, a collection of prominent ears and professional smiles, betokening the seriousness of the occasion. It was in Toledo, apparently around the age of fourteen, "like every other child," that Evans first became interested in photography: "I did have a box camera, and I developed film in the bathroom." He was at that age, he said, "visual ... But I was both graphic and visual in school as well as literary, and I was always drawing. For example, in school we were supposed to draw some maps. I couldn't stop drawing maps, and I made fine maps. I just went on and on and on." He had painted, too, in childhood: "I'm a natural painter." But it was not all a matter of ease and facility: "I also went through a period of insecurity, shyness, and depression about it." When you were a child and then again when you were a young man, you looked at other people's paintings and realized that you couldn't do what they had done. "I had to get over that." In Toledo, Evans recalled, he attended high school for only a year or two. He was pulled out to attend a boys school, Loomis, in Windsor, Connecticut.
But in Evans's scattered recollections he would recall that around 1919 or 1920, when he was sixteen or seventeen, he had attended the Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. Fifteen years later, in 1935, on a photographic assignment traveling through Pennsylvania and West Virginia, he made a special trip, first to a hotel in Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, where he and his "Happy Evans family" had stayed. He had become aware of the distance he had traveled in time from the young boy in white flannel long pants who, at fourteen or fifteen, had strolled along the causeway to the source of the springs. In 1935, for the first time, he had been struck by the architecture of the hotel and sardonically noted his failure to have noticed it when a boy: "Observant boy remembers classic portico and swimming pool but not rooms slept in, not a trace of memory of this, or of food eaten or dining room or arrival." Given his adult interest in vernacular architecture, he noted that he had "completely overlooked the gingerbread wings of the hotel" when he and his family had visited there.
The following morning, leaving the hotel late in the morning, he continued his sentimental journey: "Visited Mercersburg Academy—deserted, touched by a mild rush of reminiscences that was I think me in 1919 or 1920. Discovered that some things did happen to me there and that I am at least partly the same person I was fifteen years ago. I liked something there more than I knew at the time. Discovered by comparison that space shrinks with advancing time, or seems to." There were reasons, it appears, for fixing the present in its irrevocable time: It would become a principle of his photography.
Evans's education continued in the same spotty fashion. When his mother and father separated, Evans moved with his mother to New York City and from there, he was sent to Phillips Andover in Andover, Massachusetts, a prep school for well-to-do young boys. His performance those two years at Phillips Andover was hardly spectacular. Nevertheless, he was admitted to Williams College in Williamstown in September 1922. Despite the poor showing of his Andover records, Evans would claim, "I started reading at Andover with a real love of reading and then I carried it on so much at Williams that I didn't do much else but read in the library." Judging from his grades at Williams College, it may well have been true. Evans's recollection, supported by his records, was that he had dropped out of Williams after only one year. It was the end of his education, he claimed, "although I left in good standing. I don't remember studying anything. Paid a little attention in class." Evans's education did mark the beginning of a lifelong interest in literature, for, as he claimed, his first ambition in life, in fact, was to be a writer.
(C) 1999 James Mellow All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-465-09077-X
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