When entering the gallery of Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the first thing I noticed was the simplicity of the photographs and the way he presented them. They were just small and framed in white. There was nothing spectacular about the way they were presented. I later learned that this was something he had aimed for as a photographer. He believed that a photographer should describe a subject “with such simplicity and sureness that the result seems an unchallengeable fact, not merely the record of a photographer's opinion; yet the picture itself should possess a taut athletic grace, an inherent structure, that gives it a life in metaphor.” This was just one interesting thing I learned about this amazing photographer. Baldwin Lee, in his presentation and discussion on Friday, November 12, 2010, showed me even more fascinating things about Walker Evans’ photography.
One interesting observation that I made was the manipulation of the viewer’s emotional reaction to his photographs by taking multiple shots of the same subject and choosing which one captured what he was looking for best. An example of this is the photograph of Main Street in Saratoga Springs, New York in 1931. Evans took several photographs of the same area, all at different angles, positions, and even on different days until he settled on this final photo. The reflections on the rainy street, the rows of nearly identical black cars, the way the tree branches hang over the street and the angle of the photo all portray a particular feeling to the viewer. Evans chose this photograph as the one he wanted to show because there was something about that area of Saratoga Springs that made him stop and look, and he felt that particular photograph captured exactly what made him stop. Similarly, he took several shots of Allie Mae Burroughs, a mother and wife of one of three sharecropper families Evans lived with in order to complete his project of documenting the conditions of people living in poverty in the post-depression era. When Evans’ assistant, Baldwin Lee, spoke about Evans and his work, he compared two of these shots of Allie Mae Burroughs. In one of them, most of her features are illuminated, her forehead is wrinkle-free, and her mouth almost seems to be showing signs of a smile. There is even a reflection of light in her eyes that give them a sort of glow. She looks like she could be happy. This is not what Evans saw when he was living with them, when he had “snooped around in dresser drawers and under beds, and took notes”. He saw their hardships and the way they struggled to make a living, and he felt that the photograph most of us know of Allie Mae portrays that reality best. In that photo, her eyebrows are furrowed, her lips are more positioned in a frown, and the shadows around her eyes are far darker than the previous photo. You can see and therefore feel the pain and even hopelessness in her life. That is Evans’ goal when he takes several shots of the same subject: to portray reality and manipulate how the viewer feels about that subject.
The second observation I made was the connection between Evans’ love of the written word and the photographs he took. Evans discovered his love of literature after his parents’ divorce, when he went to live with his mother in New York and went to school at Andover. He even “entertained the idea of being a writer himself,” but he respected good writing too much and basically felt that he was not good enough for a literary career. So, he decided on a career in photography, his second love. However, in my opinion, in choosing to be a photographer, he achieved the same goals had he been a writer. Instead of telling stories, describing characters and scenes, and portraying emotions through words, he was able to do the same things through the photographs he took. Although it is more documentation than it is fiction, he is still telling the story of the lives of the sharecropper families and showing through portraiture the things they are feeling and going through. A good example of this is, as previously mentioned, the portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, and the way it tells of her struggles. Another good example is the photo of Allie Mae and Floyd Burroughs’ bedroom. Though it is not a photograph of either of them, it tells a great deal about their lives. The room is dark and plain. There is only a gun hanging above the bed, and the bed itself is nothing but a metal frame, a mattress, two thin pillows, and a single white sheet. During Baldwin Lee’s presentation, he discussed this photo, and showed us closer shots of this photo. When we were able to see this scene in more detail, we saw stains and flies all over the sheet. It helped us see exactly what kind of conditions this family was living in and the things they could, or couldn’t, afford. From this photograph, I am able to imagine this sharecropper couple working hard all day only to come to bed and sleep in such a terrible bed. This imagery that I, and anyone else who sees these photos, form in my head is the goal that both writers and photographers, like Walker Evans, share.
Seeing Evans’ photographs in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men showed me the world of the post-depression era like I had never seen it before. These photographs were also some of the most beautiful and even inspiring photos I have ever seen. It was a privilege to listen to Baldwin Lee, the assistant to this great photographer and a great photographer himself, and it is an experience I will not soon forget.
-Samara Cobus
Sources:
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/E/evans/evans_articles3.html
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/09/19/8272885/index.htm
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