Upon entering the Foster Gallery for Baldwin Lee’s exhibit of the life and portraiture of Walker Evans I was attracted immediately to the familiar photographs of the Burrough’s family. While staying as a guest at the home of sharecropper Floyd and Lucille Burrough, Evans managed to depict the struggling life of a poverty-stricken family, obviously devastated by the Great Depression. The particular photograph that caught my eye right away was of wife, Lucille, in which I found myself overwhelmed by a feeling of the struggle and despair that was radiating from her darkened eyes. The pictures to follow were of her husband, children, and more interestingly her home. Evan’s had a unique way of capturing the still life in a way that it made you more susceptible to the minute details in which a passerby would not normally have noticed just by glancing. For example, the photograph of the Floyd and Lucille’s bedroom caught the essence of their economic downfalls by displaying their messy bed, which is covered by stains and flies. This picture of the bedroom was coupled with a bedroom from a far more wealthier family from New York (in Lee’s PowerPoint) which really portrayed the difference between these lifestyles and who was more effected by the downfall of the Great Depression.
Another aspect of this exhibit that interested me was the letters written from James Agee to Walker Evans. These letters displayed a companionship and understanding of the two artists in their personal fields—and you truly could sense the amount of respect in which Agee had for Evans. Given they had worked so closely to document the lives of three farmer families in the south of 1936, its quite understandable to the degree in which these two created such a bond; which in return would come to be displayed throughout the pages of ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.”
At the end of Baldwin Lee’s lecture, he briefly mentioned to the extent which Evans ultimately avoided the different members and generations of these families after his work was done. When asked to share his findings and work to future generations of people from those areas, he had first denied these requests. Eventually, he ended up following through with the proposal but made it distinctly clear that he was not to see or talk to any members of these families. More interestingly was the fact that these obviously struggling families had not been contacted since their initial meeting, and furthermore had not even received a copy of ‘Let Us Praise Famous Men’ or had they received any commission from the book that had documented their lives
Overall, I found this exhibit to be both mildly depressing and fascinating. The portrayals of the people that Evans and Agee documented made a lasting impression on me that I will not soon forget. The body language or way in which these family members were posed for the photographs had a lot to do with this. Evan’s had an eye for accurate depiction of emotions through the photos and used them to his advantage while trying to document the strife of the rural lower class. His lighting and angles in which he shot were very effective as well, for he always presented the picture in a moving way. Even the layout of the book itself has been seen as controversial to those were are weary of this project; for Evans displayed all of the pictures in the front while Agee had written the descriptions separately in the back. However the vivid details of Agee’s words simply make it hard to forget the life and struggles of farming tenant families at that time.
--Mary Timm
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