Walker Evans exhibit review - Emily Schulz

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.

Jamie Nelson_Let us Now Praise Famous Men

"This is why the camera seems to me, next to unassisted and weaponless consciousness, the central instrument of our time and is why in turn I feel such rage at it's misuse: which has spread nearly universal a corruption of sight that I know of less than a dozen alive whose eyes I can trust even so much as my own" (9). This quote taken from James Agee and Walker Evans' book Let us now Praise Famous Men gives some insight as to what these two men were trying to accomplish; to document the lives of people who were struggling through the Great Depression. Some may argue that to some extent these two men exploited these families through their use of documentary photography and powerful written responses but what these two men accomplished through their combination of these two mediums was far greater then the exploitation of these poor families. In contrast, what Agee and Walker accomplished had to do not with the exploitation of these people, but rather to show the dignity that these people still possessed even when living in the worst of conditions.

Starting out the book with the landloard Chester Bowles looking like a baffon proves this. Evans depicts these people "boss" in such a light where all of the other characters of the story seem dignified. The homes of these people were kept clean; what little time they had apart from working in the fields these families tried to keep what humble possessions that they had clean and orderly. Their faces and bodies covered in dirt showed how long and painstakenly long these people were out in the field taking their job seriously. In one review, a comentator describs Evans photographs as follows "Evans' dis-interested approach to these families resulted in portraying them with dignity and strangth, although they lived in colete poverty. He sought to show the beauty of order and respectability within such an impoverished condition" (1).

Agee, Jamies, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960. Print.

"Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." American Studies at The University of Virginia. Web. 13 Nov. 2010. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ug97/fsa/letus.html

Jamie Nelson_Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

"Similar but extremely different at the same time" is how Baldwin Lee described the two portraits of Allie Mae Burrows that Walker Evan's took in his exhibition Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These two photographs are an excellent example of how Evans manipulated scenes and the people in them in order to convey a message. In one of the photos Allie Mae seems to be smirking; laughing about something unknown to the viewer. The other photograph the other hand shows a battered and beaten woman. These two photographs are distinguished solely by the head position and the facial expression of the subject. During Lee's lecture, the photographer explains that each and every position of the camera was specifically chosen by Evans in order to convey meaning. "Thought, consideration and reflection of feelings a human can have" is how Lee described Evans' goal in what he was photographing. Evans style consisted of dead-on angleing not hiding any emotion or flaw from the viewer. Evans did have some manipulation going on in his photographs, however his photos are very real and very calculated in order to convey feeling and connection with these people.
Evans also used his eye to create as Lee put it "a collage of juxtiposition". He carefully chose his angling in order to create new meanings and feelings about a particulare image. Some examples of this would be a photograph of a building with an ionic order of Grecian columns in the front. Such a grand building during the great depression; someone wealthy enough to comission such a building is obviously doing rather well. However, upon closer examination you see that Evans has taken this photograph at this angle in order to showcase the sign on the front. Which ironically reads Signs. The person who thought themselve grand enough to inhibit such a building is now too down on their luck and was forced to sell their building to a sign maker. Evans does a terrific job in showing us that even the slightest angle change or manipulation can completely alter the meaning of an image.

'Looking is harder than it looks' is the thing I remember most from Baldwin Lee's presentation. It doesn't seem like it would make a lot of sense but in the context of the exhibit it does. Walker Evans was incredibly precise in his work, capturing little details that entirely shaped his photos that others may not have noticed. Things such as taking a photo of the bed, but showing the dirtiness of it with the flies and stains that others may not have focused on, or the display of cardboard pictures over cardboard boxes nailed to a wall for insulation are examples of that precision. I think the photo that sticks out most in my mind was the picture of the sign shop. It seems to be straight on, but as Lee pointed out the doors and windows are not centered with the columns meaning it was actually shot from an angle. This was done so that you could see the letters s,i,g and s that signaled this grandiose building that had been designed for someone who probably thought he was something pretty special had been turned into a sign shop.
I think the other thing that really stuck out to me was the repetition almost in some of Evans's photos such as two similar pictures of two very different fireplaces. I think it's interesting to see the different places such similar photos were taken in. Perhaps the most intriguing thing about this display to me is that Evans never went back to these places, and never wanted to meet the people he photographed or their relatives in later years. The fact that he didn't send them a copy of the book he photographed them for was also interesting to me. I can't figure out why he didn't do it, but it seems very rude to profit off of their photos and not at least give them the final version of the product.

Walker Evans & Baldwin Lee

“You talk about simplicity. When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn't considered an artist. I didn't get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that's just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it.” – Walker Evans

The book “let us Now Praise Famous Men” came from the photographs and thoughts of Walker Evans and James Agee. The book stemmed from a magazine article the men were writing. The two men spent weeks with mainly three white sharecroppers in the rural south. Having seen Evans pictures in class and online, I didn’t understand why they were so special. Even the book did not do very well after it was published, but has since won high praises and is used to study both journalism and photographic innovation. But as I listened to Baldwin Lee speak I began to like Walkers photographs more and more. Baldwin Lee is a professor of art at the University of Tennessee. He has many permanent collections and has won numerous awards for his photography. Much of his success has come from learning firsthand about photography with Walker Evans, were he began work as a dark room assistant.

Walker Evans was born into a wealthy family in St. Louis. He graduated from Phillips Academy and studied French literature at Williams College. As Lee stated, literature is Walker Evans true love. Which I thought was interesting and can see the correlation between literature and photography. Although literature is left open to interpretation, it is much more straight forward than photography. When you see a photograph it is the viewer who has to decipher what the photographer’s message is. Before listening to Lee speak I walked through the gallery to get a look at the photographs, after checking them out I was impressed but many of the pictures looked so simple I didn’t understand the meaning behind them. “looking is harder than it looks” is what Evans stated. He was very specific in what his pictures were supposed to mean. One of the most interesting photographs Lee discussed was the sign shop in Mississippi with the ornate ionic pillars. The way Evans manipulated the camera and angle to make the door off centered and block out the letter “N” in signs was very interesting. Another image I really enjoyed was the one of the poverty stricken families in their home. There were many things which caught my eye in this photograph. The first thing I noticed was how poor they really were. The wife and mother had very dirty feet, and a young girl was standing with her arm over the baseboard of a bed, which made it look like she was holding a crutch. These subtleties are what make the image so powerful. Another thing which Lee stated was that Evans never talked to those families again and wouldn’t talk to their relatives. I don’t understand why this is the case but I assume he or their families feel he has taken advantage of them for his own gain. Another fascinating thing we discussed was how one minor adjustment can change the whole meaning of a picture. The picture of the woman standing against the wood side of a house looks like she is reserved and angry; there are two versions of this picture though. In the second picture Evans uses the flash bulb which illuminates her eyes which makes her look happier and more open.

The main message I got from Lees visit is that “looking is harder than it looks” before listening to Lee I would have passed off some photographs I didn’t like at first glance. Now I will spend more time and try to understand what the photographers message is to the viewer.

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1634

http://baldwinlee.com/about.htm

The correct response.

What is the correct response? What is one supposed to feel when given that little portal into history, into someone else’s life, into some intimate or vulnerable moment that others try so hard to remember? My response is plain; an ever resounding moment or awe. Walking through the exhibit was like walking through the hallways of history; a specific time, long ago, that changed a piece of the world forever. So what then? I leave this exhibit and go on with my life? I am greatly moved by these photographs that stand in front of me, exposing their subjects, exposing me to their defenselessness. I take in each one, in turn and let it fill me up, taking in the contrast, the shapes, the lines, the faces, the buildings, the fallen things. I remember seeing the photograph of the Silas Green Show Poster and the mule team when I was in high school. I was in an American Literature course and we were finally breaking out from the Great Gatsby and exploring the great depression. I remember this vividly, the moment where my teacher put up a virtual copy of this photograph and asked the class what they felt when they saw it. One kid said that he liked horses. One kid said that it looked like a dirty alley. We were 15 or 16, maybe 17, but none of us really understood what was happening, not one of us “got it”. I have to admit that I didn’t “get it” either. I didn’t understand until it was in front of my face, tangible, full of contrast and emotion. They are just mules, pulling a cart, in front of a rough brick wall that has been plastered with popular tent show posters. This is all obvious. This was obvious to a room full of high schoolers. What wasn’t obvious was the sadness that emanates from these animals, from the bricks, from the torn poster, from the breaking cart.
So, what is the correct response? Notice things. Grow. Expand your view of the world and realize that we are all just small ants of this universe. There is pain, has been pain, will be pain that is beyond any pain that we could ever know on our own. We are a collective and these photographs are proof.

--Cameron Stoeger

Paige Greisinger-Skeie--Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Baldwin Lee’s Presentation---

Upon walking to the Foster Art Gallery to attend the lecture presented by Walker Evans' assistant, I never would have thought that someone could know so many crucial and tiny details about every single photograph that was taken, especially since they were all taken some time ago...while also sharing a very special friendship with him. I honestly expected that Baldwin Lee would be a very quiet man with a thick accent, only to learn that he was very outgoing, clear, and an excellent speaker. I found it very interesting when he spoke about how Walker Evans’ was not trying to document the great depression, but rather share his ideas with the rest of the world. All of the photographs that Baldwin Lee specifically talked about also had a lot to do with Evans’ point that “looking is harder than it look”, and that each picture had a hidden meaning or detail behind it that might have been unseen to the naked eye. The photograph I found most interesting was the one of the kitchen (I can’t remember the name of it), and how if you look at it, it only looks like a battered, worn down kitchen, and probably belongs to someone who wasn’t very fortunate to afford nice things. But then he zooms in and shows that there weren’t as many forks present as there were spoons…and then elaborated on the story of how many of them were probably lost due to the fact that the piece they were jammed into was continuously moved up in order to avoid tiny fingers (which is why they were probably lost). I also found it fascinating that some of the pictures were actually very difficult to take as far as the various camera angles and lighting strategies Walker used in order to make his photographs appear perfect. Also, the reasons for why he found a setting interesting seemed strange to me, but after seeing the final result, I saw why he wanted to document something that was so simple, but also so abstract from any other photographs from this time. Like how he wanted to have a stump very evident in a few of his photographs, or how the font of letters compelled him to take a picture. My favorite reason for why he took a photograph though was that Evans' found it funny that during this Great Depression, one of the more well off (Bowls) people of this time had a wrinkly suit. Even though he could afford to do other things, he couldn't at least iron what he was wearing.

Overall, I thought that listening to Baldwin Lee speak about Walker Evans' journey was very fascinating and beneficial but also very interesting. It is crazy that he knew so many facts and details about every picture, and how they were all taken, and for what reason. He clearly had a bond with Walker Evans’, and wanted to continue that friendship with him today to share his life and experiences with college students like myself.

--Source: Baldwin Lee. "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Photos by Walker Evans". Artist Lecture. UWEC Foster Art Gallery, 12 November 2010.






--Foster Art Gallery Exhibit

Although we had seen a few of Walker Evan’s photographs during lecture in class, it was fascinating to see an entire gallery of so many pictures he had taken. It was clearly evident that there was a theme going on in the gallery which was the results of the Great Depression in the 1930s and 1940s. Although these photos might seem like they would serve as a way to document these results, they were really Walker Evans’ own ideas about what the Great Depression was. Compared to modern contemporary photographers, I feel like Evans’ really displays what is actually there, instead of constructing a photograph that tells an imaginary and fictional story. When I visited the exhibit on one of my breaks from class, I was shocked to see how raw and real every single picture was. The eyes in every single picture felt like they were following my footsteps because the stares were all very intense, yet very sad. A photograph that impacted me was one of a small toddler hanging off the side of a bed, in-between either the head board or foot board, grasping on to the top rail. I couldn’t tell if this child was a boy or a girl simply because they are dressed in tattered and dirty clothes with messy hair, and no modern day identification of what would be flowers and butterflies or trucks and footballs to help me determine who this child was. What really got me in this photograph was like I mentioned earlier, the stare in his eyes…he looks very alone and seems like he is struggling to live any kind of a normal life. The way his eyes looked was also evident in many of the other portraits in this exhibit. Compared to the times today, I feel like the photographs may be specific to only those who are actually struggling to survive the economy, but not everyone is struggling like they were back in the 1930s. All of his pictures were very interesting and made me wonder how all of these people were doing, and what specific struggles they each had in their everyday lives. But they also made me wonder how I would do in a time like this. I honestly don’t think I would have been able to live any kind of a normal life, just like every person and setting in these photographs. They all made me feel very fortunate to live in a home where I can live securely and comfortably.