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Good Evans!
There are many candidates for the accolade ‘greatest’ photographer of all. The same names may appear on many lists of such, but the nearest you could expect to a general consensus would be a shortlist. One might reasonably expect to see Henri Cartier-Bresson in the running for inclusion. And for me, and many others, Walker Evans would also be a good each-way bet to reach the final frame.
Evans died in 1975, aged 71, almost 50 years of which were spent camera in hand. He made his mark as a photographer with the American Farm Security Administration in the mid-1930s, producing two seminal bodies of work at that time: Let us Now Praise Famous Men, in collaboration with writer James Agee; and American Photographs, an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 and published in book form the same year. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was published in 1941. The Hungry Eye - just out from Thames & Hudson - is an Evans’ career retrospective, presented chronologically and divided into ‘phases’ with each preceded by a contextualising essay. If you could only afford one book on Evans then this might be it - all the images from American Photographs, for example, are here - but although beautifully reproduced in duotone (with later work in colour), by shoehorning 470 images into 368 pages this becomes a reference work rather than a photography book. Many images are quite tiny; but if you are after a definitive guide to the career and oeuvre of Evans, well written, informative and as complete as they come - and at a fair price too - then this is the one for you.
Many Are Called was originally published in 1966, accompanying an exhibition at MoMA titled Walker Evans: Subway Photographs. Evans had begun photographing passengers on the New York subway back in 1938 through a buttonhole in his coat; around three years later he had amassed some 600 images which he then began to edit; it was a further 25 years before they were exhibited. This reissue by Yale (the university where Evans was appointed professor emeritus just before his death) retains his colleague James Agee’s original introduction, alongside a new foreword from Luc Sante, author and visiting professor at Bard College and an afterword by Jeff L Robinson, associate curator of photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with whom this volume is published. In all there are 90 of Evans’ secret subway portraits, richly reproduced in duotone.
Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, Gilles Mora and John T Hill, published by Thames & Hudson, £16.95 (pb), ISBN 0 500 285292.
Many Are Called, Walker Evans, published 18/11/04 by Yale University Press, £25.00 (hb), ISBN 0 300 10617 3.
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