Artist Blog

Every week an artist whose single image was published by Der Greif is given a platform in which to blog about contemporary photography.

Likely taken while Evans was contracted with the Resettlement Administration in West Virginia in 1935 this image is item #1 in the case of the people vs. the people who think Walker Evans is boring. The flattened space and composition are a not so subtle wink to let us know that he had aspirations beyond dry bureaucratic contracts. If this was in color you could mistake it for a Shore and not loose face. This Shore in particular (Presidio, Texas, February 1975) is dealing with space in a very similar way, in fact in Uncommon Places (Shore's seminal monograph, no time for footnotes, just go buy it) Shore describes this image in a way that could easily be applied to the Evans above. "So Justin, yeah, we get it's a nice picture, why are you telling us this and what's your point?" My point, dear blog reader, is that I think Walker Evans occasionally gets short-shifted as an old guy who photographed poor people, I could be chasing paper tigers here (am I using that right?), or tilting at windmills or some other metaphor to describe inventing an enemy, but it feels like (particularly among Leica-toting wiper-snappers) Evans is misunderstood, dismissed as a documentarian. I say not fair! He made art, he was an artist, and he tricked the government into paying him to do it (I realize that that's less impressive in the EU, but trust me, on this side of the pond it's pretty neat). He made the above image a solid 40 years before Shore's (an image that's fully canonized as Art), as part of the the New Deal and it kills, both as a document of a time and place and as an image. So go look at a Walker Evans book. Also, if you look closely you can make out an "MOR" on one of the street signs, that's Morgantown a few miles up the road, home to WVU and, at one point but no longer, to three generations of my family. Consider this my introduction. I'm going to do my best to rant at least once a day, always with visual aides. Thanks, Der Greif, for handing me the keys.