Walker Evans: Depth of Field presents one of the most comprehensive assessments to date of the influential photographer’s powerful career.
Past Exhibition
Walker Evans: Depth of Field
June 11 – September 11, 2016
Truck and Sign, 1930
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
Yale University Art Gallery, Everett V. Meeks, B.A. 1901, Fund, 2009.163.1Evans often playfully juxtaposed text and image in his work. For this photograph, Evans captured a seemingly oxymoronic sign as men loaded it onto a New York City truck.
Berenice Abbott, 1930
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Marian and Benjamin A. HillThroughout his career, Evans made portraits of his friends and acquaintances, of paying subjects, and of anonymous people who populated the towns and streets he documented. Evans had an innate ability to draw people out, capturing an inner stillness. In this photograph of a friend, photographer Berenice Abbott, Evans depicts Abbott confronting the viewer with a direct, unflinching stare. The portrait is carefully composed: an area of shadow in the upper right corner is interrupted by the diagonal sweep of Abbott’s hair and balanced by a soft light on the left.
Roadside Gas Sign, 1929, printed ca. 1971
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Marian and Benjamin A. Hill, 2000.180Evans took this photograph early in his career. The large-scale print shown here was made from the original 1929 negative in 1971 under Evans’s authorization for a retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. The print unites the beginning and end of his career, as he sustained a lifelong interest in vernacular advertising.Here, he has captured a hand-painted roadside sign, its hastily scrawled letters sitting atop layers of paint and paste, hinting at an unknowable history. Evans thus isolated an easily overlooked piece of the American landscape for examination as an aesthetic object. The print’s large size bears a relationship to actual roadside signs, which Evans became fond of collecting and exhibiting as found art.
Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936, printed 1971
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from a friend of the Museum, 74.82 LOn assignment for Fortune magazine, Evans collaborated with a friend, the writer James Agee, on a project that became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—now among the most influential publications in the history of photography. The men spent three weeks in Hale County, Alabama, in the summer of 1936 following three families of tenant farmers. The resulting photographs offer a raw and direct perspective on the families’ lives. The collaboration never ran in Fortune, whose wealthy readers wanted no reminder of the impoverished conditions in rural areas. The book achieved iconic status with its second edition in 1960.
Coal Loader, Havana, 1933
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Marian and Benjamin A. HillIn 1933, Evans traveled to Cuba to make photographs for an upcoming publication; though he was given a small list of subjects to capture, he skewed toward photographing his own interests and left the country three weeks later with more than 400 images in hand. While in Cuba, Evans worked within a set of self-devised series, focusing on portraiture, architecture, and street scenes. The work in Cuba directly prefigured Evans’s photography of the Depression-era South.
Mask, British East Africa, Tanganyika Lake District, 1934–1935
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Marian and Benjamin A. HillIn advance of an exhibition of African sculpture, The Museum of Modern Art in New York hired Walker Evans to photograph the collection of nearly 500 objects from which the show was drawn. The resulting prints are dynamic, tightly framed portrayals of the sculptures. Determined to depict the works without the distraction of shadows, Evans used an 8-x-10-inch view camera on a tripod and fixed the aperture of the camera to be very small. During the more than a minute-long exposure, Evans moved the studio lights around the sculpture, which eliminated any presence of shadows in the final image.
Barber Shop Interior, Atlanta, Georgia, 1936
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from the Atlanta Foundation, 75.29Walker Evans created some of his most iconic and recognizable work during a tremendously productive thirteen months from June 1935 to the summer of 1936. As part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration (FSA) was tasked with documenting the recovery of struggling rural areas. Armed with an 8-x-10-inch view camera and a discerning eye, Evans set out to document the Depression-era American landscape. With his watchful eye and canny sense of composition, Evans transfigured the ordinary so that familiar objects—a post office, a barber shop—revealed readily overlooked characteristics.
Subway Portrait, New York, 1938
Walker Evans
Gelatin silver print
Collection of Marian and Benjamin A. HillWalker Evans prowled the New York City underground, discreetly snatching likenesses of the passengers who surrounded him. Describing himself as a “penitent spy,” he waited twenty years to release the portraits publicly. Evans wrote, “As it happens, you don’t see among them the face of a judge or a senator or a bank president. What you do see is at once sobering, startling, and obvious: these are the ladies and gentlemen of the jury.”
Graffiti: “Here,” 1974
Walker Evans
Polaroid print
Collection of Marian and Benjamin A. HillThough Evans once denounced color photography as “vulgar,” he experimented with different types of color film as it became available, producing works of extraordinary nuance. In the mid-1970s, Evans used Polaroid technology to construct images with startling color juxtapositions. By removing letters and words from their original contexts in a somewhat jarring fashion, Evans created abstracted artworks that demanded attention.
Overview
Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975) is widely considered among the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His pioneering “lyric” documentary style was elegant, subtle, and direct, fusing a powerful personal perspective with an objective record of time and place. For more than fifty years, Evans focused his penetrating lens on the American scene, building a catalogue of our nation’s social landscape and collective identity through a portrayal of small towns, working-class families, modern urban life, and printed advertisements.
Evans is best remembered for his work documenting the American South, where he made among his most indelible images during the Great Depression, but his career was long and full of innovation. His early work from the 1920s on the streets of New York was inspired by European avant-garde aesthetics and a deep interest in literary conventions. Before chronicling the Depression in America, Evans trained his eye on the working class of pre-revolutionary Cuba. In the decades following his seminal Southern work, he demonstrated interest in covert candid photography, meditated on the aesthetic possibilities of signs, and experimented with color Polaroid film.
Evans’s diverse contributions anticipated and resonated with the mid-century Pop Art movement, insisting that art could be an act of taking, collecting, isolating, and assembling everyday artifacts in new contexts. This exhibition presents one of the most comprehensive assessments of his powerful career to date.