Walker Evans: photo books, poetry and jazz

This is about Walker Evans. I first saw his pictures in the book he did with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book was published in 1941. I probably read it some time in the 1960s, probably after I’d come home from the Peace Corps in Senegal and was trying to catch up on the country I’d grown up in but really didn’t know very well. Looking at Evans’ photographs in that book was probably the first time I’d seen white Southern poverty.

I’ve seen those images of the Hale County, Alabama, tenant farm families a number of times since. But it’s almost as if I didn’t need to. Their impact was such that I can just about recall them to memory if I stop for a second: the tiny, precarious wooden houses; the children barely clothed; their parents, some with impressive dignity, some bent and worn away like old trees on an exposed hillside.

This summer, I missed, by just a few days, a large Evans retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The exhibit moved on from there to San Francisco. But I’m not likely to get out there before it closes next February. So I did the next best thing: I went to my shelves and pulled out two books on Evans I’d accumulated but never read

One is a retrospective of Evans’ work covering nearly 50 years, from the late 1920s until shortly before he died in 1976. The Hungry Eye was put together by Gilles Mora and John T. Hill and published in 1993. The other book is American Photographs, the book Evans published at the time of his 1938 exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. 

Mora and Hill made me aware of just how important American Photographs has been in the history of photography. And now I regret even more missing the Pompidou show. I would have liked to seen what critics make of the book these days.

American Photographs is often credited with being the true first photo book, in the sense that it wasn’t just a collection of images held between two covers. With the selection of the photos, and especially their sequencing, Evans wanted to convey something more general, something independent of the individual photos and their content. Hill, in a short essay in one of the editions of American Photographs, says that Evans sequencing created something analogous to poetry.  The idea is, perhaps, that the individual images are the language — the words and phrases — that Evans uses, as he decides on placement and order, to create additional meaning.

If that’s true, like some poetry, I’ll probably need several readings before the meaning appears. But maybe, rather than poetry, jazz would be a better metaphor for a carefully and intentionally created photo book. In this sense, you could say Evans starts off with a recognizable theme and carries it along for a bit. Then, there’s a chord change and perhaps a series of unexpected rearrangements of what he started with. Maybe later there’s even a key change and a different kind of development. At the end, the piece may or may not circle back to where it started. 

Still, even if I don’t always follow where Evans is going in American Photographs, I’m absorbed in the music. And I already have some of the tunes in my head.