For my latest Art History assignment, I visited the Walker Evans exhibit at the Foster Gallery at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. The exhibit featured Evans’ photographs from the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee.
Part One of this assignment was to write observations of two of Evans’ photographs; Part Two was to review the exhibit as a whole.
Exhibit Review
Evans’ photographs were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to document the hardships of sharecroppers in the South. But Evans did not just document the lives of farmers during the Great Depression. He meant to put his own style on the photography; he meant to make connections and tell stories. Baldwin Lee, in his lecture last Friday, told us that Evans sent all his outtakes to the government and kept all the best photos for himself. Evans was an artist, and yet he says, “Nobody knows what art is, and it can’t be taught. It’s the mind and the talent of the eye of the individual who is operating this machine that produces what comes out of it. He selects, whether consciously or not, what he is doing; and that really leads to the question of style.”
These photographs are relevant to the history of photography because they show a fusion between documentation and artistry, and they contain both portraiture and still life. Evans vehemently denied documenting in his photography, and yet he still ended up doing that whether he admitted (or realized) it or not. These photos are also important for America’s history because they offer a glimpse into our past; the briefest of looks into some of the lives of those who struggled during the Depression.
The easiest difference to note between contemporary photography and what Evans did is the kind of camera used. In the 1930s, digital photography was nowhere near being invented yet; neither was color photography – both would come along later. Yet the style Evans used – that fusion between documentation and artistry that I mentioned before – is still evident in many photographs of our lifetimes. As for the situation, with a struggling economy, there are obvious differences. For instance, everyone now has at least a little money; the stock market has not crashed the way it did in 1929. No one is struggling quite like they did back then. Americans are still having their hardships, but they are very different hardships from the ones of the sharecroppers in 1936.
I found this exhibit to be very thought-provoking. Before I can come up with more pithy statements I shall have to keep reflecting on all that I saw and heard. A final quote to leave you with: “Looking is harder than it looks.” –Walker Evans, quoted in Baldwin Lee’s lecture.
Observations of Photos
Dora Mae Tengle – 2005.08.28
Hale County, AL
Summer 1936
The young woman, Dora Mae Tengle, is standing alongside a wall – perhaps her house. There is a door just behind her, and she walks out of the shadows into the sun. She wears a large muslin shirt (flour sack made into a shirt?) over another darker shirt. The muslin has dark trim along the edges and a pocket on the right chest; it is held together with a large safety pin. The largeness of the shirt suggests that it was once a man’s shirt, trimmed to be worn by a woman. She wears a beaded necklace, likely to make herself feel pretty. Her face is covered in freckles. On her head is a woven straw hat; I can see that her hair has been piled up in the back under the hat, although one wisp has escaped and fallen over her forehead.
This photo is of a young woman who still retains a simple beauty under her hardships. Dora Mae cannot be much older than any of us university students. At such an age, her outer beauty has begun to bloom, and yet it is already beginning to fade. She has a shyness, a sweetness in her face, with hints of laughter and youth. But even at such a young age her youthfulness is masked by tiredness, weariness, skepticism, a sense of being defeated by the day-to-day living. The look on her face is one of having been walking and then glancing up as the picture was being taken. It is as though she was caught by surprise, and her expression cannot decide whether it is on the brink of tears or at the point of helpless laughter.
Othel Lee (Squeakie) Burroughs – 2005.08.06
Hale County, AL
Summer 1936
Little Squeakie is a toddler, perhaps not more than two years old. He sits on the dusty ground next to someone else – a brother, or his father perhaps. He wears a muslin shirt (or a flour sack made into a shirt?) and I think he may also be wearing pants – but because of the way he is sitting it is difficult to tell. His shirt is held closed by a safety pin. The sunlight is coming from the right; it looks like Squeakie and his family member are sitting against the house, perhaps in the afternoon. His fine blond hair is tousled and his bare feet are dirty from running around without shoes. He is playing with a bottle; he is holding it in his hands as though for a moment he stopped playing while his attention wandered elsewhere. He holds his tongue between his lips, as children sometimes do while playing and/or concentrating.
Squeakie is too young yet to truly understand his family’s hardship, yet he is not too young to feel it. He still has that childlike curiosity and caution in his eyes; there is still the light of youth there as well, though even that is already beginning to be shadowed. Squeakie is not looking at the camera; his eyes are riveted at an angle in the direction of the camera but toward the ground. I think perhaps he was distracted by something and the camera has caught him gazing at whatever it was that distracted him from his game with the bottle.
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