I have a separate post planned on the subway photographs – in this one I’ll concentrate on American Photographs.
The first thing Evans taught me was a basic distinction between beautiful pictures and interesting ones. The best-known champion of photographic beauty is perhaps the American landscape photographer Ansel Adams. This is not to say that Adams photographed sunsets and other cliches – part of his ambition was to expand our idea of what constitutes beauty – but nonetheless his approach was an aesthetic and formalist one, which also found expression in his fetishization of the photographic print as a finely crafted artefact. Evans, by contrast, didn't care much for darkroom technique, and constantly recropped and reframed his images, sometimes literally cutting up his negatives to this end: the very opposite of treating them as sacred objects in the way that Adams did.
Adams and Evans were unsurprisingly not fans of each other’s work. Evans wrote in a letter about an early show by Adams that it was:
disappointing. His work is careful, studied, weak [Paul] Strand, self-conscious, mostly utterly pointless. An abandoned steam roller, quite beautiful, in the middle of a desert, titled ‘Capitalism 1933.’ Wood seasoned, rocks landscapes, filtered skies. All wrong.
And later, in a 1973 interview:
I draw something from being in nature, but I don’t use it. It bores. Those who do [use nature] like [Eliot] Porter and [Ansel] Adams bore me. I’m not interested in their art. I don’t even call it art. I’m interested in the hand of man and civilization.
From the other side, Adams mentioned Evans in several letters to friends. To his fellow photographic artiste Edward Weston: ‘Your shells will be remembered long after Evans’ picture of two destitutes in a doorway.’ And in another letter:
I am so goddamn mad over what people from the left tier think America is. Stinks, social and otherwise, are a poor excuse and imitation of the real beauty and power of the land and the real people inhabiting it. Evans has some beautiful things but they are lost in the struggle of social significance.
To the painter Georgia O’Keeffe on American Photographs:
I think the book is atrocious. But not Evans’s work in the true sense. … It’s the putting of it all in a book of that kind – mixed social meanings, documentation, esthetics, sophistication (emotional slumming), etc. Just why the Museum would undertake to present that book is a mystery to me.
This is in part a misinterpretation by Adams of Evans’s purposes. The latter’s famous manifesto note to himself after agreeing to work for the government department of the Farm Security Administration in 1935 reads in all caps: 'NO POLITICS WHATEVER'. A reminder to resist the New Deal propaganda purposes of the FSA and pursue, as far as possible, his own ends. In fact, these certainly included an interest in the ‘real people inhabiting the land’ – along with the works of their hands, which he perhaps even thought beautiful, even if the amateur painted signs and impoverished interiors he chose as exemplars did not meet Adams’s quite different aesthetic standards. Though Adams’s misconception does perhaps point to the broader reception of Evans’s work at the time – most of the latter’s friends and acknowledged artistic peers were certainly of the left (Ben Shahn, James Agee). But Evans himself said in a 1974 interview:
I didn’t like the label that I unconsciously earned of being a social protest artist. I never took it upon myself to change the world. And those contemporaries of mine who were going around falling for the idea that they were going to bring down the United States government and make a new world were just asses to me.
I actually learnt how to use black-and-white film and a 4x5 field camera from Adams’s how-to books on the subject, although his obsessive attitude to technical precision was far beyond both my means and my inclinations. In choosing Evans as my model, I was not only in sympathy with his preference for culture over nature, but mindful of one of Garry Winogrand’s aphorisms to the effect: why photograph anything where the thing photographed is more compelling than the image of it? Surely the only reason to photograph is the possibility that the image changes the meaning of the photographed thing, or at least makes us see it differently? In other words, a photograph of a sunset or stunning natural landscape surely cannot transcend the original – can only point towards it, not make us see it in a new way. So why bother? Winogrand surely learned this lesson from Evans.
So it’s no surprise that few of the images in American Photographs depict picturesque things. But all of the images are intelligent, and most of them are interesting: that is, Evans was interested in what they depict, and the images invite us to share that interest. They are also photographed with care, ‘correctly’ exposed and printed (that is, rendered with as full as possible a tonal range), even if they lack the exquisite, jewel-like, quality of Adams’s prints. Many of Evans’s architectural subjects were shot in what he obviously considered to be optimal lighting conditions – that is, in direct sunlight and often in side lighting raked across facades to emphasise relief. These architectural subjects were all (or almost all) shot on an 8x10inch camera, necessarily mounted on a tripod: the very large negative produced a consequent richness of detail (Adams used a similar camera). This meant composing the image upside down and back-to-front on a ground-glass screen viewed from under a darkcloth. So they were never spontaneous or casual images, and Evans’s biography contains many references to him planning such shots in advance, returning to locales at times when he knew the sun would be in the right position.
The looser shots of people, mainly shot on smaller cameras, in many cases handheld on 35mm film, have more varied lighting effects and less meticulous technique, as you would expect. It’s worth noting that at this period, even a ‘fast’ film probably had a speed of about ISO100. So, even with a handheld camera, shooting in direct sunlight was not only optimal but often essential.
It was only after the publication of American Photographs that Evans embraced the idea that it was possible to obtain effective photographs in lighting conditions that made technical perfection impossible, when he ventured onto the New York subway with a 35mm camera.
Evans’s architectural compositions are notoriously flat, often shot head-on to facades, walls and other surfaces, and a higher than usual proportion seem to be telephoto compositions, which depict deep space but compress its several planes. I say ‘higher than usual’ because shooting close in on a wide-angle lens is conventionally the default for architectural photography.
What then do the images depict? American vernacular culture, including not only architecture, images (signs, posters), but also faces and costumes. Most of the photographs are of public and urban scenes, of exteriors, shop fronts, and anonymous streets. Unsurprisingly, there are no conventional landscapes at all, and barely any overt traces of nature other than the occasional tree or ploughed field.
Some of the images are portraits, but obviously taken outside and in the moment, of people encountered by chance in public. Some of this group are obviously not aware of being photographed; others appear indifferent, bemused or irritated, on the point of objecting or questioning the photographer’s intentions. Or, in a couple of cases in which people appear as smaller details against the larger backdrop of architectural subjects, they are a little more relaxed, both because Evans is obviously making no attempt to surprise them (it took some time to set up the large-format camera), and because they correctly infer that they are not the central subject of the image.
There are a few interiors: Evans’s biography makes it clear that these houses and apartments all belonged to friends, friends of friends, or to locales where Evans’s visit was arranged by the Farm Security Administration. In other words, he never negotiated access himself. There’s one image of people in a flood-relief camp, from an FSA assignment from 1937. And two images from the portfolio of Alabama tenant farmers that Evans created with James Agee in attendance as writer and intermediary in 1936, for their joint project later published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. In these cases, the unguarded response was in effect offered to Agee, not Evans (‘Agee was very gifted … [at] making people feel all right. In fact, they began to love Agee and to be awfully interested.’) But most of the photographs of people were taken on the street, and there are more photographs of architecture than of people.
The earliest images date back to 1929 (with one solitary example from 1928), but probably two-thirds of them date from 1935–6, the most productive years of Evans’s career – and perhaps two-thirds of this latter group come from 1936. Just how productive this period was is illustrated by the fact that several ‘classic’ images by Evans from 1935–6 were not included in either the book of American Photographs, or the accompanying exhibition at MOMA in 1938.
This image, for example, is featured prominently in most Evans anthologies, and admired in part for its obvious metaphorical reading: that is, it depicts the life cycle of American workers, who, we might assume, live in the houses in the midground, work in the industrial sites in the background, and are buried in the foreground cemetery. Evans perhaps sidelined it precisely because this reading seemed too obvious an illustration of FSA propaganda purposes.
To understand Evans’s achievement, it’s useful to think about the difference between a series of photographs and a sequence. The former is exemplified by the typographical studies of Bernd and Hilla Becher from the 1970s and 80s, in which they photographed industrial structures – blast furnaces, pit heads, and so on – using a standardised method, that is, under equivalent (flat) lighting and always with a similar composition, viewpoint, framing, etc. The end result is a catalogue of forms, encouraging comparison and attention to minute variations, and usually displayed in grids. The precise order in which the images are viewed is unimportant: it’s the overall and cumulative effect that matters. Every image is of equal (un)importance, and the rhythm of their succession is unchanging.
This is still one of the dominant modes of contemporary photography, and indeed of contemporary art in general – endless repetition of the same idea, under the impression that such repetition intensifies rather than diminishes its force.
A sequence proceeds differently. In its simplest form, the succession of images marks intervals in time, which may be more or less regular. The nineteenth-century locomotion studies of Eadward Muybridge are an example of this approach applied under controlled conditions and with absolute regularity in the name of scientific accuracy, and hence with something of the same formal anonymity that often marks the series. But other sequences are situated within the flux of life, and aspire to the coherence of a narrative. To this end, they vary intervals, choosing significant moments centring on human drama, conflict and change. This kind of sequence used to be common in photojournalism and its narratives can be quite conventional, especially when they are explicated by written commentary, which often attempts to constrain their possible meanings – as we saw when discussing Paris After Dark.
In other sequences, the logic is not governed by narrative or chronological succession, but rather by theme, so that the sequence proceeds dialectically, by the same principles as cinematic montage, and each successive image inflects, complicates or comments upon ideas introduced by its predecessors. This last is how American Photographs works, and its willingness to continually reframe its presentation of its themes is emphasised by the variety of images it contains, taken on different kinds of camera with quite different protocols of engagement.
In the book, the images are displayed one per spread, on the recto, with a blank preceding verso, and no text at all, except for a list of titles at the end of each of its two parts, with a separate, general essay by Lincoln Kirstein at the very end (there’s some suggestion he helped finance the book’s publication as well). So, although the argument is created by the succession of images, each is encountered separately and we’re therefore encouraged to consider them as independent statements before thinking about their possible relation to what comes before and after.
Many people have written on the logic of the sequence, but to summarise some of their analysis: the book starts with an exterior of a business where one can obtain ID photos for driving licenses and so on, as if to say that what follows will in part be about the process of photographic representation itself, its purposes, and – given the shop’s presence is advertised by hand-painted fingerposts – about urban semiotics and pictorial representation in general, including the relation between the mechanised/industrial photograph and the handmade sign. The next image is a window display from a small-town photographer’s studio, a grid of dozens of sample head-and-shoulder portraits of smiling or neutral American faces. Again, this is about the conventions of photographic representation, already codified in the 1930s, but also about the idea of anonymity, a constant theme throughout Evans’s career. Popular culture is anonymous culture, and the studio photographer’s work is an example of American vernacular quite as much as the signs featured elsewhere in the sequence. The third image is a pair of young men photographed in the street, perhaps watching a parade, itself a conventional part of American public culture. They are shot using a quite different approach from that adopted by the studio photographer, but with the same interest in the range of anonymous physiognomy. The next image is then a political poster, with an idealised painting of a politician’s face (but likely based on a photograph), and displayed in another window. And so on.
There are eighty-seven images. It has to be said, however, that by the time we get to Part Two, which is mainly architectural views, the principle of succession seems to have become ‘Here’s an example of American vernacular architecture; here’s another; and another.’ Or, as Gerry Badger puts it, 'the book settles down to being merely an inventory of things'. So I’d agree with Badger that the book’s claim to sophistication and complexity really rests on its first half.
The accompanying exhibition had a different and slightly larger selection of images, and was also sequenced and arranged differently, in several shorter sub-groups linked by theme, and displayed in such a way as to challenge the pieties of Adams and his ilk, with some prints pasted directly onto the gallery wall.
Note that the book version only includes two images from those taken during Evans’s shared project with Agee in 1936, and both of those are variants compared to the versions included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Presumably Evans wanted to keep the two books conceptually distinct, although he included many more of the Alabama images in the exhibition, where most of them made up a distinct sub-group.
The photographs in Push Process unashamedly follow Evans’s example: in their detached perspective and their formal variety, moving between 35mm handheld shots of people and large-format architectural images. Although my argument and themes are different, I’ve also included a long sequence of forty-eight images with no accompanying text in a manner analogous to American Photographs. I’m well aware this makes my work old-fashioned, even anachronistic. This was already true for the period in which I made the images – 2000–5 (or 2000–1 in the fictional narrative of the novel they accompany); even more so in 2024. But this belatedness didn’t seem important to me then – and still doesn’t now – both because my project in Venice was a historical one – in which category I also include the history of photography itself – and also because I don’t believe the possibilities of Evans’s approach have yet been exhausted.
Here’s a video where I review the beginning of the long photosequence in Push Process in terms that are obviously indebted to Evans:
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