In ”Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye” . writer Gilles Mora efforts to gaining control and represent every important facet of the photographer’s life and times via his art work. Evans was a Depression-era lensman with the Farm Security Administration and subsequently editor of Fortune magazine. His work was featured in Time magazine and he was the first lensman to be given a solo show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1938. In 1935. he had his first exposure show at the museum. a series he called “African Negro Art. ”
Evans did non ab initio set out to be a lensman. but ended up as portion of a category of FSA lensmans that included such greats as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams. He was born to comfortable parents in St. Louis in 1903 and go to college in New York for a twelvemonth earlier traveling to Paris to see the universe. In 1927. he returned to the New York literary scene doing friends with others who would travel on to hold a immense impact on his calling. He foremost began taking exposure in 1928 and worked on Wall Street as a clerk to a stockbroker until the stock market clang in 1929.
A twelvemonth subsequently his first exposure. of the Brooklyn Bridge. were published in a book of poesy by Hart Crane. During the Depression. Evans toured Cuba where he met Earnest Hemingway and worked for the Resettlement Administration in West Virginia before fall ining the FSA. He spent a great trade of clip hiting American architecture as a mode of entering history and life and besides spent 3 hebdomads populating with sharecrop farmers in Alabama for a piece for Time magazine that James Agee was supposed to compose.
The piece did non run into Time’s criterions. but he and Agee would print the narrative and exposures in 1941 in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” Evans chiefly used an 8” by 10” big format camera for his Depression epoch work. though he would exchange to 35 millimeter in his ulterior old ages. He is chiefly known for his effort to document life as it was without the influence of the lensman being felt in the exposure. This was. of class. impossible given the medium that he was utilizing.
The big size format combine with the movie type meant that frequently his topics would hold to stay inactive for several proceedingss while the movie was exposing. Still. even his staged exposure appeared to be accurate scenes of life in the South in the Depression. During World War II. Evans was a regular subscriber to Time magazine and after the war he joined the staff of Fortune magazine where he was a regular subscriber until 1965. In 1965. he left the magazine to go a professor of in writing design at Yale Univeristy in New Haven. Conn. . where he remained until his decease in 1975.
Evans is best known for his Depression epoch work. but he besides did several series after the war trying to document American life. He did a series about American industrialisation s shooting from a traveling train and about the people of New York City that he shot on the metro with a camera hidden in his coat. Evans is credited with holding a strong influence on several American creative persons most notably Andy Warhol. who may hold gotten the thought for his photo-booth series from work that Evans had done in a photo-booth.
It is believed that Evans began experimenting with the usage of exposure booth imagination every bit early as 1929 in an effort to deprive himself from the function of creative person in the pickings of the exposure. Evans argued throughout most of his life in favour of the thought that picture taking should be a record of what was and non an artistic medium. Mora attempts to picture Evans’ work in a mode every bit closely as possible to the manner they were originally presented. intending some reproductions in the book are little and hard to appreciate. but as a whole Evans’ organic structure of work is astonishing for its word picture of the human spirit.
