![]() Store windows full of boots and pants and gloves, diner menu boards (comparing the prices on the two, either food was basically free or clothes were staggering expensive back then). But Walker was fixated on the ephemeral flim-flam of a burgeoning consumer society. A lot of Atget’s empty Paris street corners from the edge of photography’s first century look much the same today, and that of course carries its own appeal. With his early, most-famous work, you’re definitely looking at dead people and vanished places. Because part of what really turned me on with Evans was that it distills the time-machine, necromantic power of photography to a potent tincture of something you can’t get in a drugstore anymore. As I write this, I wonder if getting older might have changed my appreciation of that work. Atget’s Paris street tableaux often have a sterile, depopulated vibe, or at least that was my impression when last I checked. But from my admittedly casual exposure to Atget, Evans’ flavor of vulgar documentation is much tastier. The show text (in French and English, with the English in legible font, I’m happy to report) points out Eugene Atget’s influence on Evans, and I could see that. Just schmoes and schmoettes, schmoing along, like me and (if I dare) you. He not only shot the craggy, now-picturesque sharecroppers, but also the not-poor, not-rich, not-beautiful people. Poor people, for the love of god, though I suppose he was in good company with the rest of the Farm Security Administration team, and you probably couldn’t shoot a frame in Depression-era America without having someone hard-up wander into it. But Evans was leading the pack when he indulged his interest in random store fronts. Now, we take photographs of any damned thing. This gave me some insight into just how crazy his documentary impulse might have seemed at the time. He didn’t start with a big project – he just did what felt right, then fit the results into some kind of project later, so the world could deal with it. But he also claims to have not really thought much about it himself when he did it. One gets the sense that he didn’t much care what other people thought, which is one thing. ![]() ![]() There’s a video interview with Evans at the end of the show, I think made in the 70s, where he says that he basically just did what he felt like doing. Not quite in the same vein as Koudelka, but they are definitely spirit-brothers across the decades. I was of course aware of Evans’ shining position in the firmament of Great American Photographers. I came to this show as most people would come to it – with a vague idea of its importance, a readiness to appreciate tempered with the cynicism of someone who, more than once, has found work in the canon to be more pop-gun than howitzer, but without the stamina or intellectual rigor to really set out why. This is my uneducated, off-the-cuff reaction to the work of an acknowledged master. The graduate theses on Evans alone could probably fill the back of a Depression-era panel truck, not even touching the virtual reams on the web.
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