Evans, Walker Books

The Photographer's Eye

John Szarkowski

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The Photographer's Eye by John Szarkowski is a twentieth-century classic--an indispensable introduction to the visual language of photography. Based on a landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1964, and originally published in 1966, the book has long been out of print. It is now available again to a new generation of photographers and lovers of photography in this duotone printing that closely follows the original. Szarkowski's compact text eloquently complements skillfully selected and sequenced groupings of 172 photographs drawn from the entire history and range of the medium. Celebrated works by such masters as Cartier-Bresson, Evans, Steichen, Strand, and Weston are juxtaposed with vernacular documents and even amateur snapshots to analyze the fundamental challenges and opportunities that all photographers have faced. Szarkowski, the legendary curator who worked at the Museum from 1962 to 1991, has published many influential books. But none more radically and succinctly demonstrates why--as U.S. News & World Report put it in 1990--"whether Americans know it or not," his thinking about photography "has become our thinking about photography."

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: The American Classic, in Words and Photographs, of Three Tenant Families in the Deep South

James Agee, Walker Evans

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Total reviews: 22 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.

Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.

Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. --Mary Park

Reading American Photographs: Images As History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans

Alan Trachtenberg

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Heavy weight American Studies 5 out of 5 stars.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful.

If your interested in the mind of America, what we think and why we think it, Trachtenberg is your man. This is a very detailed, dense, and enjoyable work on the topic. It's premises are taken from the evidence gleaned from photographs and the history of the profession, a relatively new one (in the process of its own revolution from chemical to digital).

Editorial Review:

Winner of the Charles C. Eldredge Prize

In this book, Alan Trachtenberg reinterprets some of America's most significant photographs, presenting them not as static images but rather as rich cultural texts suffused with meaning and historical content. Reading American Photographs is lavishly illustrated with the work of such luminaries as Mathew Brady, Timothy O'Sullivan, and Walker Evans--pictures that document the American experience from 1839 to 1938. In an outstanding analysis, Trachtenberg eloquently articulates how the art of photography has both followed and shaped the course of American history, and how images captured decades ago provocatively illuminate the present.

Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary

John T. Hill

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Walker Evans's career spread over 46 fitful and prolific years, yet in a scant two, 1935-1936, he produced the singular body of work that came to define him. During that brief time, while working for the Farm Security Administration (previously the U.S. Resettlement Administration) photographing the consequences of the Great Depression, he refined a hybrid style that combined documentation with sly personal comment. He delighted in traveling incognito as an artless photojournalist, but with the independence to satisfy his own artistic designs. Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary presents these seminal images for the first time as a comprehensive, cohesive body of work, in chronological order. These are prime examples of Evans's alchemy, his seemingly effortless transformation of mundane fact into sweeping lyricism. They not only define his mature style, but also offer a path for artists of future generations. Evans has been called the most important American artist of his century, and the impact of his vision reaches well beyond the province of photography. With texts by John T. Hill, Heinz Liesbrock and Allan Trachtenberg.

Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye

Gilles Mora, John T. Hill

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great Book 5 out of 5 stars.
13 of 13 people found this review helpful.

This book is very informative of Walker Evans. It shows a wide variety of his work form portraiture to architecture, from the streets of New York to exotic places. It not only shows the works of art but also shows short blurbs about the place he was at and what was happening in his life; like why he was there and what he wanted out of the photo shoot.

The part I like best about this book is that it references whose work he was admiring at the time. It also references his feelings, whether it was something he hated or something that was inspiring him. The print of the book is also very representational. It shows in great detail the contrast and depth of the works of art. I give the book 5 stars. I really enjoyed reading the book.

Editorial Review:

A concise, reduced-format edition includes the same content as the original 1994 edition and 300 duotone photographs, in a portrait that surveys every significant aspect of his life and work, from his self-education and early specialization of street-life observations to his three-year involvement w

Walker Evans

Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman

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Editorial Review:

In 1930 a disaffected young photographer in New York pointed his camera at two workers shoving a huge sign reading DAMAGED into a truck. With that image, Walker Evans gave birth to the quirky, edgy genre of street photography. Yes, this is the same Walker Evans famous for eye-level photographs of Alabama sharecroppers, rural churches and roadside signs. The special appeal of Walker Evans is that—in addition to nearly 200 classic photographs—it offers new images and fresh assessments of his work, based on diaries, letters, field notes and unpublished negatives acquired a decade ago by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The engagingly written essays by four specialists all bump up against the contradictory impulses of this meticulous, aloof yet curiously passionate artist. A self-described "gray man," he hated color photography. Yet the photographs from his final years--he died in 1975--include strikingly offbeat Polaroids of the glum or startled faces of friends and acquaintances. Four decades earlier, too inhibited to confront strangers directly, he hid a camera in his coat to capture the slack faces of subway riders. Despite the unadorned power of his images of people, Evans had a deeper connection to vernacular architecture and roadside signs. He photographed these everyday subjects straight on, at eye level, deliberately opting for the most deadpan approach. Yet the images are imbued with Evans' unique sensitivity to subtle visual rhythms. Influenced by Surrealism, he freely cropped photographs to shift the viewer’s perspective. Despite his ardent scrutiny of the American scene in the 1930s, Evans stood apart from politics and disdained both sentimentality and social criticism. His omnivorous appetite for the culture of his time was tempered by the sober documentary influence of nineteenth century photographers Eugène Atget and Matthew Brady. For all its shrewd commentary, this beautifully produced book discusses Evans' life only insofar as it illuminates the story of the photographs. More detailed accounts are available in biographies by James R. Mellow and Belinda Rathbone. --Cathy Curtis