Svetlana Alpers’ book on Walker Evans begins, after a half title page, with reproductions of 143 of Evans’ photographs, not captioned on the page. Then follows the list of captions and only after that the title page and the book proper with its numbered pages of text—a silently eloquent way to say: the pictures come first. About a dozen of these are in muted color, the rest in black and white, which is unsurprising when one notices that 127 of them were made between 1927 and 1941—about a third of those in 1936 alone, Evans’ annus mirabilis—and only sixteen between 1946 and 1974, the year before the photographer’s death. The idea that “in his later decades Evans was not as cogent, powerful, and consistent a photographers as when he was young” is hardly an idiosyncrasy of Alpers’. He is one of those artists—like Walt Whitman, like Louis Armstrong—who accomplished his great work early on. Also like Whitman, Evans wedded his name to an idea of nationality: His first exhibition (and the first-ever one-person show of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1938) was called “American Photographs.” Alpers focuses on his profound connection to French culture, literary in the first place (his masters were Baudelaire and Flaubert) and then photographic (he was already on his own path when he found confirmation through Atget) to show how “Evans always viewed his country as if from the outside and often with an ironic eye.” Unlike Baudelaire’s, more like that of Flaubert, Evans’s irony was not so much metaphysical as social and aesthetic. He formulated it well when he rather extravagantly appreciated a Wright Morris photograph of a chair as bearing “some of the shoddiness and all the heartbreak of the century”—Morris himself, Alpers points out, claimed no more than to have liked the chair; but Evans evokes something like “that irony and pity that are so essential to good writing,” as his direct contemporary Ernest Hemingway thought. Evans’s irony has something to do with the way that, as Alpers observes, his eye is a collector, fixed on the object the sight of which catches him—and “not on the beauty of the frame” (which he nonetheless achieves, after the fact, by editing); the object takes on an uncanny salience it lacks in the everyday. How this distinguishes Evans from other photographers Alpers doesn’t communicate. “With others, you sense the staging of a photograph, whether to look planned or to not look planned,” she says, but “With Evans, the photographic apparatus is not in evidence. It appears to be a matter of his eye. The world is seen with the eye rather than viewed. It’s hard to put it into words.” It’s rare that a writer as fluent as Alpers must confess to thus being rendered inarticulate. I wish I understood better what she means, because when I look at the picture she has in mind, I see the classical framing before anything—as if I were coming to the image in the opposite direction from Evans, from the frame to the object rather than from the object to the frame. Alpers wants to know how Walker’s photographs were made. She’s pried into the workshop, examined the negatives, taken note of the cropping. But the relation between how they were made and what they are remains open. So does the question of the relation, if any, between what they are and what they do. Evans was able to face down paradox—for instance, “I believe in cultural distinction and I also believe in social justice and they don’t go together.” Alpers does not try to force a resolution but as a scholar, where she is most comfortable is not the realm of paradox. Best known as a specialist in seventeenth century European painting, she has evidently written this book out of personal need, not professional duty. Either way, she knows this: “For a writer, working time is expansive and can be almost without end.” Luckily, books get finished somehow.
❂
Svetlana Alpers, Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch, is published by Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2020.
❂
BARRY SCHWABSKY is art critic for The Nation and co-editor of international reviews for Artforum. Along with many books on contemporary art, he’s published three books and several chapbooks of poetry as well as a collection of mainly literary criticism, Heretics of Language (Black Square Editions, 2017). His new book of poetry, A Feeling of And, will be published next year by Black Square.