The Flaubert of Photographers

Photographer Walker Evans died three weeks ago today, Thursday, April 10. Two days earlier he was in Cabot Living Room discussing his life and work in Martin Perez's South House seminar. "Lives Examined." A frail-man with a hoarse, halting voice and poor hearing. Evans seemed physically older than his 71 years especially considering his mental alertness, thoughtfulness, and eloquence.

Evans studied literature at Andover, Williams (for a brief year), and finally as auditor at the Sorbonne. Some of his heroes were Flaubert. Baudelaire, and James Joyce, and he would have been a writer perhaps if he had not found their precedent paralyzing. His brief attempt at painting was definitively, according to friends, a failure.

Evans took to photography as something that he could make respectable. Scorning both the "artistic" and "commercial" examples of Stieglitz and Steichen. Evans forged a new photographic tradition based on typical scenes shot from eye level, usually from a middle distance, and in bright daylight. "Most photographers were very uneasy in my youth and they all were uncomfortable about whether what they were doing was art or not. I never was bothered about that, luckily--mencumbered by that nonsense." Evans always had a firm conviction in "straight" photography. His is "cool, precise as a police report, emotionally aloof," according to John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art.

Evans's American scenes record man-made civilization--especially that of the 30's or Depression Era. "If you're in love with civilization as I am you stick to that...Nature rather bores me as an art form...I think, 'Oh yes, look at that sand dune; what of it?'" His work is almost exclusively of this country: "Suprisingly to me, I don't work very well in other countries. I'm very interested in England and France, and I know them fairly well, but I can't seem to produce fresh, creative work. It's all a stage to me and it doesn't have any reality...Isn't it too easy to fall into the picturesque or the National Geographic style?"

Evans's scenes--recorded mostly with an 8 by 10 view camera--are storefronts, factory towns, sharecroppers and their homes, statues, gas stations, 18th century Southern mansions, peeling posters, signs. His photographs are either very frontal--showing, with seeming naivete, an object or building in its surroundings--or they are shot from what appears to be a random, arbitrary view, as one would happen upon something while walking down a street. This "snapshot" approach has become the vogue in recent years with such photographers as Bill Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, and, to some extent, Robert Frank, and these last three are, indeed, the photographers Evans named as his favorite young photographers. In his humble, gentlemanly manner--he even asked the audience's permission to be seated--he seemed loath to discuss his "competitors" further for fear of becoming "invidious," or "unethical."

Evans's photographs are often described as "desolate," "stark" "social documentaries." Many perceive his photographs as political statements or attempts at social change. But "That's inadvertent...I am not a social protest artist...If you photograph what's before your eyes and you're in an impoverished environment, you're not--and shouldn't be. I think--trying to change the world or comment on this saying. 'Open up your hearts and bleed for these people.' I never dream of saying anything like that. That's too presumptuous and naive to think you can change society by a photograph or anything else...I equate that with propaganda. I think that's a lower rank of purpose and value in your work. I believe in staying out, the way Flaubert does in his writing."

It was just this attitude that caused friction between Evans and Roy Stryker, who directed the photographers of the Farm Security Administration, causing Evans to be the first to go when there was a budget reduction in 1937. Evans was independent, not to be "directed" from above. Later in his 20 years at Fortune, he not only decided what subjects he would photograph but wrote the accompanying captions and stories. Says Szarkowski. "Stryker thought that the unit's function was to help reform the ills of the country, and Evans thought it was an artist's function to describe life. Stryker thought that the meaning of the pictures was clear, and Evans found the best of them inexhaustibly mysterious." Evans would always let people comb their hair and arrange themselves as they wanted to, for he felt that this was not only the only respectful approach but also the most revealing. The very impersonality of Evans's photographs for Let Us, Now Praise Famous Men results in specific, ungeneralized view of people, just as Agee's prose defied the desires of Fortune's editors for a stereotype view of the degradation of Southern tenant life.

Evans didn't like to talk much about his past, and friends often heard conflicting stories. He would never talk with them in any detail about the break-up of his two marriages. It was difficult for him to deal with his own success: when photographs were first shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the early 40's, he would walk around the block every day watching the crowds go in, but he could never bring himself to go in and see the show. He describes "dancing in the streets of the Village" the day Wall Street crashed. "I used to jump for joy when I read of some of those stock brokers jumping out of windows."

Evans did not go out with his camera with a political or other specific intent. He went out with a curiosity in life-styles, in the objects that people surround themselves with, the way a civilization expresses itself materially. He was an avid collector of post cards and signs. "I'm interested in signs a great deal right now, so I find that I do signs wherever I find them. I usually swipe them too. I've got a wonderful collection." Sometimes he would swipe two of the same sign to give to friends as a gift. He picked up post cards wherever he went and swapped them with friends as a boy trades baseball cards.

He had the profoundest respect for objects and people, and a deep disrespect for most institutions ("I think the government is a kind of joke really"). He was aghast when he heard of fellow "documentary" photographers rearranging objects or people to suit their own needs. This to him violated the subject's integrity: he felt that the only control the photographer should have--the only way of imposing himself on his subject--was camera angle and distance, and that even these should be used with care. But even these he forsook when in brief intervals he took to the Chicago streets with a Leica or rode the subways with the lens of his camera peeking out between two buttons of his coat. In Chicago he took an almost fixed stance, photographing people on one street corner. On the subways he had no idea how he was framing his subjects. Even in his latest color portraits with the Potaroid SX 70 he allowed his subjects to look as they wished, although he built filters and played with exposure until he acquired perfect technical control.

He seldom worried about imposing on those he photographed. "I'm quite indifferent to that up to the point where it isn't destructive...If you're at all sensitive--which artists are supposed to be and usually are--that could make conditions psychologically impossible, if you're aware of people too much. So I just go about my business unless I find I'm really hurting somebody...There's no use getting into an argument about what you're doing. Walk away and think about something else and do something else."

When asked if he had ever gone back to photograph childhood haunts, he responded. "I've gone back far enough to find out it can't be done...there's always a let down and an ungratifying experience...You go up to something you knew in your childhood and you're full of feeling about it and that feeling doesn't come through. The object doesn't reflect that feeling. You put something in it that's no longer there. Something of yourself...I avoid that strictly now. Although I'm very interested in the immediate past impersonally." Records of streets that have since been cleared out and torn down "take on a tremendous appeal and beauty far above the level of nostalgia. It's the impact of history.

At the end of his talk, someone asked Evans what it was like to grow old. "Wonderful said Evans. He described it as a "relief" at "immensely happy period" in which one is "able to reflect, consider," and "see things with greater sensitivity." Feelings and impressions are heightened not blunted and everything is "more sensual even."

As he moved gingerly out of Cabot Living room. Evans came to a girl by the door and gripped her arm. "Did you get anything out of that back there?" he queried

"Oh yes, we certainly did."

"Well, good: you really refreshed and inspired me. I feel quite uplifted."