Michael A. Vuksta
The photographer’s selectivity is of a kind which is closer to empathy than to disengaged spontaneity. He resembles most of all the imaginative reader, intent on studying and deciphering an elusive text. . . . Like a reader, the photographer is steeped in the book of nature.
[H]owever selective photographs are, they cannot deny the tendency toward the unorganized and diffuse which marks them as records. It is therefore inevitable that they should be surrounded with a fringe of indistinct multiple meanings. . . . it makes sense to speak of multiple meanings, vague meaningfulness, and the like only in connection with camera work.
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Are photographs repositories of mute facts or personal visions? I will attempt to answer this question by examining Book I of
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
.
Book I is a folio of sixtytwo photographs by Walker Evans. Our first encounter with the three tenant farmers’ families who are the subject of the photo text is a visual one. The subjects and their environment remain anonymous to the viewer. No captions or numbers referring to sections of the text identify the people and places before one’s eyes. The subjects of the photographs are revealed to us in precise visual detail and description. Facing us, they have appeared. William Stott in his book,
Documentary Expression and Thirties America
, compares this primarily visual encounter with an actual facetoface encounter:
The people in these pictures stand before us vivid with ambiguity and secret meaning; coolly eye us as people do at first acquaintance; and are plainly difficult to get to know. As with real people, we have to
work
at knowing them, commit ourselves to a kind of relationship over time.
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Evans was an advocate of “straight” photography. He claimed to photograph the world as it is. Nothing in his photographs are invented or manipulated. Stott calls Evans’s art an “art of common place reality”, his vision, “timeless, a cool and unqualified staring.”
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Jefferson Hunter in his
Image and Word
further emphasizes this quality.
[I]t is significant that their [the readers] first exposure to the pictures must be purely visual. They must study anonymous human countenances, interpreting them without the aid of caption . . . . Evans’s pictures do not invite language. He insists on an austere, nonverbal purity.
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What is also apparent in these pictures is that we confront economic poverty and the effects of human toil and suffering. Yet what strikes us is the beauty of these photographs and ultimately the beauty of the people themselves. Evans’s craftmanship and orderly compositions have functioned most adequately as an image of introduction. This formal aspect of Evans’s art of “transcendent documentary photography” masks the hardship which otherwise might repulse the viewer.
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What is further attractive to us is that these photographs are somehow familiar to us. They seem to be “as people take (or used to take) snapshots: from the front and center, from eye level, from the middle distance, and in full flat light.”
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Carol Shloss remarks that:
[T]he evidence of Evans’s pictures suggests . . . that the families felt pleasure, embarrassment, pride.—emotions characteristic of many trusting photographic sessions.
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While this familiarity is certainly true, Stott also recognizes the more deeper significance of these images. In citing the Museum of Modern Art’s John Szarkowski, Stott admits that Evans has “created ‘the accepted myth of our recent past’ ”.
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As seen through Evans’s eyes the tenant farmers appear:
complex, strong, and pervasive. He [Evans] uses their poverty to demonstrate how much they possess. Evans suggests that all they touch, and all that touches them, is permeated with their being. . . . The poor condense theirs [their possessions] in a few. Their world and everything in it bespeaks them. It is entirely a work of art.
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Stott hypothesizes that by making these people aesthetically respectable, Evans “has inevitably made hardship and poverty respectable.” The photographer (and summarily, the viewer) must also “respect, [and] not pity them.”
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Although we may at first feel a discomfort at seeing these photographs (a discomfort not much unlike that which we experience when we are caught staring at others), we are relieved to discover by the power of the camera (which is immune to this discomfort) something that may be common to us. Stott concludes that Evans’s photographic vision:
takes us, our lives, the things we use and are used by, our civilization, our humanity, with ultimate seriousness. It stares at our customary locales . . . as though they were of eternal significance. And how terrible it is to realize that though they are not, they are we.
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