Photographic Inspirations: Robert Adams, The New West: Landscapes Along the Colorado Front Range (1974)

Robert Adams was one of the photographers showcased in the celebrated New Topographics exhibition held at George Eastman House in 1975, which explored the ‘man-altered landscape’. That is, instead of the romantic, picturesque or sublime tradition of landscape photography exemplified in the US by Ansel Adams, the Topographics participants did not try to avoid evidence of human presence or intervention, but instead made this their main subject. And their aesthetic was, in most cases, one of blankness and detachment: certainly there were no romantic, picturesque or sublime images. Much of the emphasis in New Topographics was on suburbia, on the liminal zones around cities that had greatly expanded in the post-war period, an expansion made possible both by the proliferation of cheap, generic housing estates, and by the huge increase in car ownership, along with the concomitant growth of freeways.

Robert Adams, however, was not blank. His approach was more critical. One of the reasons he carried weight for me was that he worked as an English lecturer while creating these images, and he’s an eloquent writer on photography. The New West is not text-heavy, but it does include a short introduction by John Szarkowski, followed by another from Adams, who also wrote brief passages introducing each of the five chapters into which The New West is divided. These move through consecutive ecological zones in Colorado, each characterised by different patterns of human settlement or intervention: ‘Prairie’, ‘Tracts and Mobile Homes’ (i.e. suburbs), ‘The City’, ‘Foothills’, and ‘Mountains’. However, apart from these very brief chapter introductions, we revert to the Evans/Frank model, with no text accompanying the images themselves other than short titles. As with American Photographs, the images are arranged one per spread on the recto, but with the titles on the preceding verso as in The Americans. The titles also follow the same pattern as Frank’s book, with most limited to a statement of location and/or a categorisation of subject (‘Along Interstate 25’, ‘Newly occupied tract homes. Colarado Springs’), with an occasional described detail or indication of context where Adams thinks it might not be sufficiently obvious from the image itself (‘Grazing land with pines. Near Falcone’). 

Szarkowski's foreword sets out the issues at stake succinctly:

As Americans we are scarred by the dream of innocence. In our hearts we still believe that the only truly beautiful landscape is an unpeopled one. …. Now however we are beginning to realize that there is no wilderness left. … a generous and accepting attitude toward nature requires that we learn to share the earth not only with ice, dust, mosquitoes, starlings, coyotes, and chicken hawks, but even with other people. (5)

Adams’s pictures describe with precision and fastidious justice some of the mortal and venial sins that we have committed against our land in recent decades. …. But his pictures also show us that these settlements express human aspirations, and that they are therefore not uninteresting. (8–9)

Though Robert Adams’s book assumes no moral postures, it does have a moral. Its moral is that the landscape is, for us, the place we live. If we have used it badly, we cannot therefore scorn it, without scorning ourselves. If we have abused it, broken its health, and erected upon it memorials to our ignorance, it is still our place, and before we can proceed we must learn to love it. (9)

Adams’s introduction is even more direct:

Many have asked, pointing incredulously toward a sweep of tract homes and billboards, why picture that? The question sounds simple, but it implies a difficult issue—why open our eyes anywhere but in undamaged places like national parks?

One reason is, of course, that we do not live in parks …. we also need to see the whole geography, natural and man-made, to experience a peace; all land, no matter what has happened to it, has over it a grace, an absolutely persistent beauty.

The subject of these pictures is, in this sense, not tract homes or freeways but the source of all Form, light. The Front Range is astonishing because it is overspread with light of such richness that banality is impossible. Even subdivisions, which we hate for the speculator’s greed, are at certain times of day transformed to a dry, cold brilliance. (11–12)

I haven’t seen the first edition of The New West, but the Steidl reprint from 2015 is of very high quality – along with the tri-tone reproductions, I suspect that digital pre-print processes and Photoshop have allowed a longer tonal range and greater sharpness relative to the first analogue edition. (I think there was also an earlier reprint in 2008, perhaps by Aperture, which I may in fact have a copy of in a box in a shed in Melbourne, but I'm consulting the 2015 edition for this post). 

Adams's images are mostly high-key, i.e. with predominantly bright tones and few shadows. As Tod Papageorge puts it: 

[he] printed his photographs to distill the brilliant Colorado sunlight to a virtually nuclear intensity that, even as it glared down on the poor things it exposed, seemed to envelop and, occasionally, succor them.

This effect is also due to the fact that a significant proportion of the images were shot close to midday, so that the light is coming straight down, and there's little shade. A more conventional photographer would have preferred the warmer, more sculptural side-lighting of late afternoon or early morning (as Evans did, for example).

In some ways, Adams’s approach recalls that of David Goldblatt, shooting in Apartheid-era South Africa, in which deliberate overexposure was used not only to suggest the cutting light of the veldt, but the brutal social realities depicted. There is nowhere to hide in this pitiless light, no escaping the photographer’s clear-eyed judgements. But Adams is careful to retain detail in the highlights. Papageorge relates how the latter used a particularly laborious developing method, because he wanted to make sure that the empty skies retained smooth tones (the skies are bright but never blown-out to pure white in these images). 

It’s also worth noting that the predominant high-key images are occasionally alternated with low-key images shot at dusk, or even at night. The Steidl edition has tritone reproductions, which means each image had three separate passes through the printer with different inks to ensure clear tonal separations. So there’s a high level of visual detail and texture, in both the shadows of the low-key images and the highlights of the high-key ones. In other words, things are described with great care – in all senses of the word.

Papageorge says that Adams used a Rolleiflex for these images – I shot many of my Venice photographs on a version of the same camera. Like the nearly identical camera used by Ed van der Elsken in the 50s, a Rolleiflex creates square negatives approximately 6x6cm, and most models of the camera have a fixed, ‘normal’ lens. If Papageorge is correct, that means that all of the images in The New West likely have the same undramatic angle of view – this seems plausible. (A few are slightly rectangular, but they may just have been cropped. Papageorge says that Adams did not obtain the 6x7 Pentax camera he used for his next project until after finishing The New West.) The square format adds to the sense of detachment, of little visual emphasis being given to any particular element within the frame. Similarly, most of the images maximise depth of field, and most are long shots, surveying landscapes from a considerable distance, sometimes with hundreds of metres or even several kilometres separating the foreground from the background.

Adams had used a large-format view camera for his earlier work on churches. The Rolleiflex allowed much faster operation, but did not permit perspective correction in the way that the larger camera did. This means that, for architectural subjects, you either have to point the camera up and get converging verticals, or stand back and accept that you’ll have a relatively large area of foreground below your main subject in the frame. In some of the landscapes, Adams seems to gone for the former strategy, in particular where there are no real vertical lines. The result is that the sky occupies two-thirds of the frame, to emphasise its enveloping weight. But for the tract houses that form the subject of the longest chapter he keeps the camera alignment level so that the verticals are straight. Many of these images do in fact have a wide strip of foreground: empty, bleached dirt or schist, or sometimes tarmac or pavement. Indeed, these houses and mobile homes are not really shot as architectural subjects, but again from some distance – that is, set within the larger landscape. And Adams uses the foreground to balance – almost seeming to reflect – the blank, or almost blank strip of sky above. In some cases, the houses appear lost between these two empty expanses. In other cases, Adams has obviously sought out an elevated viewpoint, so he was above his main subject, which allows him to create a more synthetic composition, linking houses in the foreground to the larger developments of which they form a part in the background. 

Only in the chapter on ‘The City’ does Adams get closer in, and perhaps not coincidentally, he’s also more explicitly judgemental here: ‘Here no expediency is forbidden. …. Read the eschatological chaos of signs.’ (75) Here Adams seems too bleak – for him, cities offer only 'disgust and nihilism' (11). But in the face of the current gathering climate catastrophe, he's elsewhere too optimistic in his conviction that 'even as we see the harm of our work and determine to correct it, we also see that nothing can, in the last analysis, intrude. Nothing permanently diminishes the affirmation of the sun.' (12) 

The New West is a powerful book, but it has a narrower thematic range than American Photographs, and less visual variety. The groupings into chapters are an essential part of the book’s organisation, but within the individual chapters I’m less convinced that the precise sequence of individual images is crucial. Rather, each chapter contains multiple variations on the same idea: the repetition and the standardised approach is part of the critique. Papageorge points out that Adams shares several motifs with Evans (who he claims not to have been influenced by): ‘cars, gas stations, roadways, jerrybuilt working class cottages, modest homes sighted down empty streets, improvised churches’. But for Evans these motifs are placed in the context of an encounter between industrial civilisation and popular culture: the mass-produced is juxtaposed with the handmade, the improvised. And Evans is interested in faces – the bodily correlate to the hand-painted signs and appropriated ephemera he also depicts – whereas the few visible humans in The New West are dwarfed by the landscape, and therefore stripped of personality (apart perhaps from the teenager sitting in the minute shade cast by a mobile home, for even the choice to seek that shelter depicts him as having agency). For Adams then, there does not seem to be any possibility of resistance to the shoddiness and soullessness of the world depicted – except, that is, via the light of his photographs.

I’ve already mentioned in my post on Brassaï that I overexposed my images of Venice: partly with the intention of approaching my subject differently to him, and partly by accident. Adams (and Goldblatt) helped me to think further about the aesthetics of overexposure – which I had to think about, whether I liked it or not, since overexposed images were what I had. I was also influenced by a conversation with Ross Gibson about his work on the historical police archive of crime-scene photographs in Sydney, in which deliberate overexposure was a way to ensure that none of the relevant information would be illegible in the image.

Adams’s compositional strategies weren’t of much use to me, since the kind of distance and/or elevation they rely upon are impossible to obtain in Venice (unless you resort to cliché and go up a belltower or stand on the Accademia bridge). But his broader approach was relevant, even though Venice seems to offer completely different lessons to the Colorado West. From its foundation the history of Venice involved radical interventions in the lagoon landscape, but the city has often been seen as an exemplary instance of equilibrium between human settlement and the environment, since Venice was dependent on the lagoon for its survival: for food, transport, access to the wider world, even sanitation. A photographic project more directly inspired by Adams might instead focus on the industrial hinterland of Porto Marghera on the mainland – and indeed there was such a project around the turn of the millenium, which actually recruited two of the original participants in the New Topographics show, among many other international and Italian photographers.

Adams’s example was nonetheless useful by analogy. Just as landscape photographers like Ansel Adams refused to acknowledge the existence of the man-altered landscape, most attempts to depict Venice refuse to acknowledge the contemporary, or decry its presence. Just as Ansel Adams chose to depict scenes in which the only acknowledged human presence was himself (‘acknowledged’ only insofar as someone had to be taking the photograph), so many visitors to Venice dream of finding an ‘unspoilt’ corner of the city in which they are the only alien presence – the only tourist chosen to enter Shrangi-La. So even though almost every detail in my images is not only ‘man-altered’ but human-made – emphatically historical rather than natural – I wanted to start by acknowledging and insisting upon the absurdity of this dream. There is no wilderness untouched by human culture; there is no unspoilt corner of Venice untouched by the contemporary world.

Photographic Inspirations: Robert Frank, The Americans (1959)

The title of Robert Frank’s The Americans knowingly places it in conversation with Evans’s American Photographs from 1938, which Frank used as an 'iconographical sourcebook' (the phrase is Tod Papageorge's). Indeed, Evans sponsored Frank’s application for the Guggenheim Fellowship he used to finance the cross-country trips on which the images were taken, and these trips sometimes followed itineraries suggested by Evans based on his travels while employed by the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. But there are important differences as well as similarities.

Evans was interested in what he took to be a shared American vernacular culture. And for the FSA, if not for Evans, the disadvantaged human subjects of his photos were all aspirant participants in a shared American dream. They were just down on their luck, and needed a helping hand to participate fully. But by the time we get to Frank, there is no unified community to which his book's title might refer; or rather, for Frank, 'society is an association of minorities', to use a phrase John le Carre gives to his character George Smiley. The Americans therefore depicts a multiplicity of subcultures: bikers, Jews on Yom Kippur, a portrait of three trans people that is very striking, not only because such people were rarely depicted in documentary photography of this period, but because it’s one of only two images where Frank's subjects are smiling and playing to the camera. 

The Americans may not be a unified vision of America, but it is a very inclusive one, with many African Americans, as well as Latinos, possibly Native Americans (two hitchhikers driving Frank's car) and, indirectly, Asian Americans (via the photo of a 'Chinese cemetery'). One might say that Frank occupies one of several roles in relation to these various milieux or subcultures: a passer-by, a visitor, or sometimes perhaps a guest, but he's never a member, still less a participant. 

There are several examples of what I would call temporary pseudo-communities: bars, a casino, a factory, crowds at a film premiere, kids gathered round a jukebox, men crammed together along the counter of a diner (but all intent on their own eating). The political events also fall into this category, since there’s an emphasis on the hollowness of the rhetoric and the underlying realpolitik of wheeling and dealing: the grimacing or sneezing city father on a platform; the tuba player with an Adlai Stevenson badge whose instrument obscures their face so that its parping mouth comes to stand for the rally as a whole; the small group of men huddled together like mafiosi in a convention hall, oblivious to the larger crowd behind them ('sleek face earnest wheedling confiding cigarholding union boss fat as Nero and eager as Caesar in the thunderous beer crash hall leaning over to confide' as Jack Kerouac puts it in his introduction to the book).

Many pictures, however, show people alone – distracted, miserable, or just silent and self-contained. Or, if not literally alone, then psychologically so – for example, the man getting his shoes shined in a Memphis men's room. This image is particularly interesting: nominally a portrait of deference and privilege (the black man bent down at the feet of the white), but here transformed into what Kerouac calls 'the loneliest picture ever made, the urinals that women never see, the shoeshine going on in sad eternity'. It's tempting to read the hand over the man's face as a gesture born of shame, but more likely Frank just waited for a moment when the man's view of him was occluded, so he couldn't see Frank take the picture. This is also one of many photographs in the book depicting people engaged in service work (waitresses, a nurse, an elevator girl).

The larger idea of the country is still there, but it's represented primarily by shared symbols: the images of American flags that effectively divide the book into chapters, most of which are a little ragged and tattered (like America itself, they’ve seen better days) – and also by the cars and highways, by cowboys and jukeboxes. It's perhaps telling that the two photos of cowboys – both titled as connected to rodeo shows – were taken in Detroit and New York: that is, they're of men assuming the role as performers or audience members for a kind of travelling-circus version of the West.

As with Evans’s work, the images in The Americans are of public scenes. Unlike Evans’s, many of them depict interiors, but these are also public places: not houses, but cafes, bars, diners, restaurants, railway cars, hotels, municipal buildings. There are no domestic scenes or posed portraits at all. Cars are ubiquitous, partly because Frank’s project was conceived and executed as a series of road trips. There are plenty of cars in Evans too, but they were not so central to American life in the 1930s as they had become by 1955–6, when Frank worked. The paraphernalia of car culture is also everywhere: gas stations, rest-stop cafes, road intersections, casualties of road accidents. Again, Evans photographed car junkyards and garages, but it’s more insistent in Frank, and the infrastructure of automobile culture has become more complex. By contrast, a tram, a ferry, and a train interior all appear exactly once – and buses and aeroplanes are completely absent, though there are several photographs of urban pedestrians.

Unlike Evans, Frank shows little interest in architecture as a subject in and of itself – and despite the emphasis on cars, the suburbs are entirely absent. As the title of the book suggests, the majority of photographs have a human presence as their animating subject: that is, even if such subjects only occupy a small part of the frame, they are seemingly the justification for the photograph’s existence. There are several restricted milieux where, without the support of an institution like the FSA, Frank must have negotiated access himself (the 1956 Democratic convention in Chicago, a Detroit factory, a funeral among the black community). 

In The Photobook: A History, Gerry Badger places The Americans with Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank as an example of 'stream-of-consciousness' photography – indeed as the definitive example of this mode, which Badger links to Existentialism in philosophy, to Abstract Expressionism in painting, to bebop jazz in music, and to the Beat movement in literature. Frank's book is certainly 'rough, raw and gestural ... spontaneous and immediate, highly personal ... exciting, expressive, flying in the face of accepted photographic good taste' (233). But there's something here that goes against the stream-of-consciousness characterisation, as there also is in van der Elsken's book. In The Americans, although a minority of the images are of people glancing back at the camera, for the most part they’re not about the subjects’ response to Frank, and unlike in Love on the Left Bank, many images are quite clearly of people unaware of being photographed. Indeed, these rely on our sense of Frank’s invisibility for their force: of overlooking people caught off-guard, eating alone in a San Francisco cafeteria or sleeping in a park with their shoes off. Kerouac has it right: Frank 'sneaks around'; he has the 'strange secrecy of a shadow'. And this self-effacement seems at odds with the idea of an insistent authorial voice.

Some of Frank’s first viewers complained that this was a negative and ugly view of America: Papageorge quotes initial reviews that dismissed the book as 'warped', 'sick', 'neurotic' and 'joyless'. Some of the images are certainly ironic, if not satirical: besides the union bosses above, we might note the sailor at a Navy recruitment office visible only from his feet propped up on a desk ('Join the Navy Ask me about it' says the sticker on the side of the desk); or the racially segregated streetcar in New Orleans whose occupants all look separately at Frank, caged between the bars of its windows. This is another one of the images where Frank’s acknowledged presence is crucial to the effect, although it also relies upon his separateness from the subjects. But as with Evans, one senses that everything included here was of interest to Frank: he didn’t photograph out of enmity or disgust, but curiosity.

Evans used a variety of cameras, which required different kinds of engagement with his subjects. By contrast, every photograph in The Americans is taken from a 35mm negative, and, if I’m not mistaken, all of them were shot handheld and without flash. There's some debate online about what lenses Frank used: I thought (and to me the visual appearance of the photographs confirms this) that most of the images were shot on a ‘normal’ 50mm lens, one whose angle of view corresponds roughly to how we directly perceive a scene. But some images may have been taken on a wider 35mm lens, and a few are certainly telephoto compositions (e.g. a group at a cocktail party seemingly shot from a distance). 

In using available light and preferring a 50mm lens, Frank’s approach echoes that of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose The Decisive Moment had been published in 1952 and was immediately promoted to classic status. But Frank was otherwise reacting against Cartier-Bresson, of whom he once said: 'you never felt he was moved by something that was happening other than the beauty of it, or just the composition.' And Frank was in general suspicious of a photographic practice rooted in photojournalism, 'those goddamned stories with a beginning and an end'. So he wasn’t looking for elegant compositions, and there’s little overt drama or conflict in The Americans. Instead of decisive moments, Frank depicts (in the words of Jno Cook) 'America stood still, frozen into a frightful pose between moments'. Papageorge expands on what this means in practice:

The characteristic gestures in his pictures are the slight, telling motions of the head and upper body: a glance (19, 37 [Papageorge refers here to page numbers in the first edition, though my Steidl reprint is unpaginated]), a stare (15, 41), a hand brought to the face (31, 51, 53), an arched neck (17, 55), pursed lips (15, 31). They suggest that Frank, like Evans, believed significance in a photograph might be consonant with the repose of the things it described. 

One of Cartier-Bresson’s standard techniques was to identify a promising location or background, and then wait there for something interesting to happen – for a dynamic element to appear, and to interact with and play off the carefully arranged background, as in the image below, from 1932.

There’s little sense of Frank doing this. Where his compositions do seem superficially similar to Cartier-Bresson’s, as in the image of the naval recruitment office, it feels more like genuine happenstance. Perhaps he was interested in the flag, and the shoes were either there already, or arrived serendipitously. It’s difficult to imagine him hovering around the doorway waiting, not least because while one may anticipate the arrival of a bicycle (or a car, or a pedestrian) on a street, one would never imagine the shoes in advance.

The French title of The Decisive Moment was Images à la Sauvette, on the fly, the French idiom referred to a street peddler without a license, like the bag-sellers in Venice. And that original title perhaps suits Frank’s book better than it does Cartier-Bresson’s, even if Frank had arranged access in advance to several of his locations – but then many of Cartier-Bresson’s images were borrowed from photojournalistic assignments, something that is more obvious from the selection in The Decisive Moment than in subsequent best-of anthologies.

There are other differences. Many of Cartier-Bresson’s images aspire to a quality of lightness or grace. Frank’s images are heavy. Even by the looser standards of photojournalism, let alone those of fine-art photography, the reproductions sometimes appear underexposed. Presumably shot on the fastest available films (probably with a speed of only ISO200), many were likely push-processed. Some have poor tonal separation and poor acutance (sharpness or edge definition). The textures of objects are sometimes visible – e.g. the silk (?) protective cover draped over a Long Beach car, and the wool suit and barbered nape of a man on a ferry – but they have to compete with the texture of the medium, i.e. visible, intrusive film grain.

Incidentally, this image is one of my favourites in The Americans, for the line of hats and the intimacy with which the boy is pressed in against what I take to be his father’s back, ensuring physical contact even as each of them are absorbed in their own thoughts. But again this is not a dramatic gesture – it's hardly a gesture at all.

Frank’s aesthetic follows inevitably from the decision to use only available light and shoot in poorly lit interiors. In other words, Frank insisted on making his photographs depict the things and places he was interested in, even under conditions where other photographers would just have given up and gone home. Muddy is the word that comes to mind: not only for the tones, but for the sense that the world is full of inertia and resistance, so that existence is something you have to wade through and struggle against, and not just with a camera. 

If I have reservations about Frank's approach, it’s with regard to the images without people. The rough tonalities, dead shadows and blown highlights of the small negative seem less justified when there’s no ephemeral human element that demands to be captured on the fly. But presumably for Frank consistency was more important than Evans’s variety. Don’t muck about: master one approach, one camera, one lens.

Like American Photographs, The Americans has one image per spread, so that each photograph is first seen in isolation as an independent visual statement before one is tempted to consider its relation to others in the sequence. And the titles are similarly minimalist, although here they are displayed opposite the images instead of separately at the end. The original French publication of the book juxtaposed the images with texts excerpted from a variety of commentators on America from various epochs, sourced and chosen by an editor, but thankfully these were removed for the American edition. Frank’s position has always been that a photograph should ‘nullify explanation’: that is, its effect should be primarily visual, untranslatable into language. The titles are therefore often limited to a bare statement of geography; sometimes they also specify the type of location or a social context ('Cocktail party – New York City', 'View from hotel window – Butte, Montana'), but they almost never attempt to describe or label the individuals depicted, so we are left to make our own inferences about the relationships between them. (An exception to this is 'Jehovah's Witness – Los Angeles', but since the man is visibly engaged in distributing copies of the movement's newspaper Awake, he's effectively labelling himself. Also the image on a ferry shown above is titled 'Yom Kippur – East River, New York City', which in effect identifies its subjects as Jewish, as otherwise it would not be relevant that it was taken on the Day of Atonement.)

The Americans is certainly arranged as a sequence. There are many pointed transitions: e.g. from an older man standing alone under the stairs of a Los Angeles rooming house to another on a bench at Yale wistfully watching a line of new students in black filing past; from a pair of hitchhikers driving Frank's car to another car zooming past in the background behind a bench of sedentary Florida pensioners, followed by another car draped with a protective silk cover, then a victim of a road accident draped with a blanket, which is in turn followed by a luminous shot of an empty highway receding into the distance. Or the kneeling supplicant holding a rudimentary cross by the Mississippi, which is then followed by a silhouetted statue of St Francis holding a cross up to bless a Los Angeles road intersection, and then a shaft of sunlight illuminating three crosses marking the site of a road accident, followed by an interior of a Detroit car-factory assembly line. As Badger explains, the flow is looser and more recursive than it is in American Photographs, frequently doubling back on itself:

Ideas ebb and flow, are introduced, discarded, recapitulated, transfigured, transposed, played off and piled up against each other with the exuberant energy and precise articulation of a Charlie Parker saxophone solo. (247)

Perhaps the larger rhythm of recurrent motifs and themes, with the book split into 'chapters', each introduced with an image of the American flag, is overall more important than specific transitions from one image to the next. We might say the same of much of American Photographs, but Frank's sequence retains both its variety and its coherence throughout, without succumbing to the repetitiveness that arguably undermines the latter part of Evans’s work. 

We could perhaps describe Evans as Apollonian – characterised by sobriety and lucid description – and Frank as Dionysian – characterised by passionate intensity. Certainly the introduction by Kerouac fits this description, and also seems well-suited to the visual aesthetic. But I don't see The Americans as a work of intoxication. Frank’s response to the scenes he photographs is his alone – with very few exceptions, he doesn't share himself with anyone he depicts. So if there's a loss of self involved it is, as with van der Elsken, in the form of a kind of erasure rather than an ecstatic communion with the world(s) depicted. But unlike in the work of Brassaï and van der Elsken, none of these images are collaborations with the subjects – nor do they seem directed or stage-managed (with the possible exception of the image of the three trans people on both counts). And whereas for the earlier photographers, subcultures constitute a genuine alternative to the mainstream, a parallel and independent mode of existence, many of Frank’s subjects seem more marginal. Partly this is because Brassaï and van der Elsken photograph their worlds from close up, whereas Frank catches them in passing.

Evans found it difficult, if not impossible, to match the achievement of American Photographs. Frank didn’t even try to match The Americans, shifting his artistic aspirations to filmmaking shortly after the book's publication. Though perhaps this usual summation of his career is too simple: he continued to work as a photographer for hire, or so I infer from a famous anecdote by Joel Meyerowitz, whose own career as a photographer was inspired by watching Frank do a shoot for the ad agency where Meyerowitz worked in 1962. Indeed there's plenty of evidence online showing him doing commercial work much later than this. But he didn't publish this work in books.

Photographic Inspirations: Walker Evans' Subway Photographs

[Walker Evans intuited] the affinity between the modern artist and the secret agent – both of them intrepid observers and recorders, purveyors of inside information and coded messages, peripatetic voyeurs who embrace alienation as an occupational hazard. Mia Fineman

I’m not interested in people in the portrait sense, in the individual sense. I’m interested in people as part of the pictures and as themselves, but anonymous. Walker Evans

Between 1938 and 1941, Walker Evans took photographs on the New York subway, using a concealed (and presumably pre-set) 35mm camera operated by a remote control cable. Evans’ career as a whole, and the subway photographs in particular, may be seen as an attempt to appropriate the rhetoric of official, institutional photography – the police mug shot and so on – and apply it to other ends. In his subway project, Evans was trying to produce anonymous portraits, the complete antithesis of the celebrity glamour shots he dismissed as mere photographic name-dropping.[1] The resulting images are often praised for their intensity or psychological acuteness. Evans himself claimed that they show the subjects in naked repose, when the guard is down and the mask is off.[2]

I would argue that they actually create the opposite impression. Evans' subjects are trying to erase any expression of individuality to reduce their vulnerability to the gaze of strangers (strangers like Evans). As a result, the pictures are a little repetitive, precisely because everyone is equalized within them. Gerry Badger points out that the subjects are 'largely devoid of overt signs of class', but there are also no tell-tale gestures, and no conversations. In short, no-one is actively communicating with anyone else, least of all with Evans. Everyone is in the same null state.

Far from seeking to demonstrate his empathy with or understanding of his subjects, Evans wanted to prove that the camera can be made not to think and not to translate its operator’s emotion, and he described his purpose as follows:

I would like to be able to state flatly that sixty-two people came unconsciously into range before an impersonal fixed recording machine during a certain time period, and that all these individuals who came into the film frame were photographed, and photographed without any human selection for the moment of lens exposure.[3]

By using an absolutely minimal technique, in which he limited himself to photographing whoever happened to be sitting opposite him, he tried to render himself anonymous along with his subjects. In this project, the purpose of photography was not self-expression, but self-denial. And the result was not a sequence, as in American Photographs, but a series, a set of variations on a constrained theme. This shift obviously interested Evans, because he created several above ground variations on the subway project in the 1940s, where he stood in a fixed location and photographed whoever happened to walk past.

It might seem that Evans was attempting to attain the state of mind and technique of the ideal spy, but if so, then the ideal in question is a modern one. The early modern era – the pre-photographic era – did not associate objectivity with machines.[4] Instead, the judgement of God was the model of objectivity, which meant that truth was rooted in a consciously directed and morally informed gaze. In the law courts too, truth was closely associated with presence, with a rational consciousness, since conviction depended largely on eyewitness testimony. It is only very recently that forensic evidence (interpreted by expert witnesses who have no direct knowledge of the crime) has begun to displace such testimony. 

Photography as it is usually practiced has more in common with this older conception than Evans’ comments might imply. It is well known that the authority of a photograph comes from the fact that its subject must be present in front of the camera at the moment of exposure. What is less frequently acknowledged is that, in most cases, the fact that the photographer was physically present to press the shutter is also critical: not only, ‘This happened’, but ‘I was there when it did’. The photograph is the result of an act of perception (even if it involves a transformation of that act). Even more importantly, it is the result of a choice.

The impersonal ideal that Evans was reaching for has apparently been fulfilled with the invention of the closed-circuit television camera and/or digital webcam. Because this machine records (or transmits) continuously, without interruption and hence without the need for choice, it eliminates the need for human intervention beyond its initial activation. But I imagine Evans’ goal was less to obtain a purely mechanical image than to reduce himself to a machine: not to eliminate consciousness but to transform it.

Unlike Evans, I believe in the necessity of composition, of placing figures intelligently within the frame, and thereby defining my relationship to them, however minimal and controlled that relationship may be. To reject composition is to avoid the responsibilities that come with choice, and with one’s status as a moral agent.

Not only, ‘This happened’, but ‘I was there when it did’.

Postscript: I wrote this particular post several years ago in a slightly different context. And although I adapted a couple of sentences of it for inclusion in Push Process, where these reflections are attributed to the novel's protagonist, I wonder now if its critical stance betrays the anxiety of influence. That is, I was trying to distinguish my own photographs taken on vaporettos in Venice from Evans's subway pictures. In any case, I'm more inclined to see the strengths of Evans's subway work now, even if his decision to use a hidden camera still seems dubious (though it's difficult to imagine how he could have undertaken the project otherwise). I'd also say that the severely cropped fragments of the images that are sometimes shown, isolating the faces, don't play to the strengths of the images, which depend as much upon body language as facial expressions.  

In fact, there are various redactions of the subway pictures. The later ones use more of the negatives, a change that probably shows the influence of younger photographers like Robert Frank upon Evans. Cropping to only head and shoulders was not only an allusion to the window display of portraits Evans had shot in 1936 and included in American Photographs, but also perhaps an attempt to reduce the random aspects of the composition process. This seems perverse, a loss of nerve: chance was essential to the effect. And one of the few things that individualises the subjects is the different ways in which their bodies occupy space in the subway car (particularly since there is often little space available). The faces are usually brighter than the clothing, and so, because of the limitations of the film and the lighting, they almost feel like they're floating separately in the gloom, as the clothing and backgrounds disappear into the murk. But again, this now seems interesting to me.

[1] Quoted in Mia Fineman, ‘Notes from Underground: The Subway Portraits’, in M. M. Hamburg, J. L. Rosenheim, D. Ekland and M. Fineman, Walker Evans, 2000, p. 108. 

[2] Quoted in Walker Evans at Work: 745 Photographs together with Documents Selected from Letters, Memoranda, Interviews, Notes. With an Essay by Jerry L. Thompson, 1982, p. 152. James Agee made the same claim in his introduction to the book version of the subway pictures.

[3] Both quotations from an unused preface to Evans’ published collection of the subway photographs, reproduced in ibid., p. 160. This manifesto recalls Walter Benjamin’s claim that Photography prepares the salutory movement by which man and his surrounding world become strangers to each other … opening up the clear field where all intimacy yields to the clarification of details.

[4] However, the Italian word for ‘lens’ is the same as the adjective ‘objective’ [obiettivo] and in the early seventeenth century, Galileo’s discoveries in astronomy depended on recent improvements in the optics of the telescope, which he helped bring about in co-operation with Venetian glassmakers. The ‘realism’ of seventeenth-century painting also depended partly on the use of the camera oscura, as David Hockney has recently argued.

Photographic Inspirations: Walker Evans, American Photographs (1938)

If anyone asked me who my influences were, around the time I was making the photographs in Push Process, my answer was: Walker Evans, Walker Evans and Walker Evans. By which I meant, first, the Evans who created the images included in American Photographs, his classic monograph published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938; second, the Evans who worked on the New York subway from 1938–41, using a hidden 35mm camera to take anonymous portraits of the people sitting opposite him; and third, the Evans who used a Polaroid SX-70 to take pictures of colour fragments and textures in the last few years of his life in the early 1970s. But I progressed in reverse order: starting with a Polaroid Spectra, and eventually ending up with a 4x5 field camera.

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: