Evans

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Reading Walker Evans
(an excerpt)

Walker Evans’ American Photographs is a book whose cunning arrives as humility. Its ferocity is offered as cold poignancy. A guide, an inventory, a dispatch, a diagnosis—the book has a way of staking out the distinctness of each of these terms in a sighting of America, and then in the same gesture making each term trade places with the others. A game with symbols is at the same time a game with shapes. A game of seeing whose rules are fixed seemingly by the very nature of photography periodically suspends all rules for the sake of a humanity that struggles to survive an insistent and prepossessing Americanness.

Evans is a plain-talking griot, a trickster. As a commentator, his strategy—and, one might say, his guiding conceit—is to act as a collaborator with a medium, and to let this collaboration carry the weight of what are rightly called his passions. To let photography act, as if to unleash photography itself at America and then to stand over the spectacle more as a referee than as a creator—this is Evans’ proposition to us as his viewers. Do we accept such a proposition? Can we? The terms of his seeing stipulate that the meanings of pictures will not trade on a reconstruction of motives attributable to the photographer, but on the interactivity of the pictures themselves. In this sense, the rules of his game give him all the credit and also afford him plausible deniability for everything. Significantly, they also suggest that the photographic act neither begins nor ends with the making of pictures. Rather photographs come somewhere in the middle of the photographic event—preceded by much seeing and by many perhaps advertently anticipatory moments, and succeeded by the concatenated image sequence, not to mention archive, that they are destined to join.

Evans—whose first and perhaps deepest ambition was to write—understands that nothing characterizes the vernacular use of photographs better than the compulsion to turn them into stories, just as nothing characterizes the elitist use of photographs better than the compulsion to elevate them beyond stories, toward metaphor and abstraction. As Evans gives it to us, the hardest thing to accept about photographs is the first thing about them: that they show and do not tell. Occasionally this difficulty amounts to a small wonder—as when a picture tends toward words, invokes and leans on them and somehow remains incommensurate with them. With Evans this is often the case. One is almost tempted to say that for Evans, a photograph is narrative in a state of constantly pending arrival—and so perhaps a more intensive experience of language than sentences or poems allow. Still, Evans also knows that whatever forms of story might lurk in photographs are bound to fail as promises. He knows that the relay between images—his true medium—both prolongs and hastens the end of each picture’s utterance. To insist that stuttering lexical movements within and between articulate, lucid pictures are the basic terms of photographic meaning, as Evans does, is precisely to shift the telling of Americanness into the arena of interval, simultaneity and caesura. In effect, it is to present “America” in the condition of photographs themselves.

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The opening sequence of Walker Evans’ American Photographs

After the American Century is my own book in response to Evans’ American Photographs.