Sunday, November 14, 2010

I felt getting the opportunity to view the Walker Evans show at the Foster Gallery at University of Wisconsin Eau Claire was a wonderful enlightenment. I was able to see the photos that previously I was only able to view in books and the internet. The photos were stunning highly detailed. They were all gelatin silver prints that were taken from the original negatives of 8 x 10 plates. Seeing the photos made me realize how much quality and detail is lost in any kind of reproduction.

A great example of small details is Bed, Tennant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama, 1935. Baldwin Lee, a former student of Evans, pointed out the small detailing information of this photo. When I first looked at the photo even at the gallery I didn’t look closely enough to the small details. Baldwin Lee said Evans always said, “Looking is harder than it looks.” Lee says you can have 20:20 vision and that doesn’t matter until you train your eye to look at the close features and the intention behind the photograph. In this photo, Lee pointed out on the bed sheets there are small flies. This feature gave clarity to me for the reason why Evans chose to document to photo. As you can see with this replication of this photo the details of the flies are lost. According to Thomas Nau, the author of Walker Evans: Photographer of America, “During the preparation of the photo for printing, the flies were removed from the image. When Walker saw the test proof, he demanded that the flies be shown in the final printing.”
Coal Dock Worker 1933, was another photo I found fascinating after Baldwin Lee pointed the process that Walker Evans took to get this portrait and the wonderful facial expression on this man’s soot- black face. Evans knew he wanted a picture of this man the whole time but he also knew that he wouldn’t be able to get this expression if he just asked if he could take a photo by himself. I found this to be a great technique to get a more relaxed photo. Lee said, “Evans presented himself to people so he could be trusted.” Evans rejected fairy tales of the rural South and worked with his subjects to directly represent their dignity in the face of hardship. The resulting images are a bare-bones inspection of the inner resources that enabled these people to survive. The compositional economy of the images makes the truth of the situation self-evident. I feel the coal dock worker shows just this. You can see the hardship he is going through in his face while still maintaining his dignity as a man.







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