Visual Studies

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Walker Evans: No politics

by Stephanie Schwartz Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020, 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4773-2062-4 (hardcover) $45.00 and Walker Evans: Starting from
scratch by Svetlana Alpers Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, 416
pages ISBN: 9780691195872 (hardcover) $39.95 Reviewed by Jerome Krase,
Brooklyn College of The City University of New York

Jerome Krase

To cite this article: Jerome Krase (2022) Walker Evans: No politics, Visual Studies, 37:5, 705-706,
DOI: 10.1080/1472586X.2022.2043180

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2022.2043180

Published online: 11 Mar 2022.

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Walker Evans: No politics
by Stephanie Schwartz
Austin: University of Texas Press, 2020, 320 pages
ISBN: 978-1-4773-2062-4 (hardcover) $45.00
and
Walker Evans: Starting from scratch
by Svetlana Alpers
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020, 416 pages
ISBN: 9780691195872 (hardcover) $39.95
Reviewed by Jerome Krase, Brooklyn College of The City
University of New York
You might think that reviewing two books about the work
of the same person would be an easy task. However, in the
complex case of Walker Evans, you would be very wrong.
Even though each of these detailed biographies are
extremely well written and well illustrated, they tell very
different stories even when they are dealing with the same
visual subject matter. These contextual differences have
as much, if not more, to do with which of the two art
historians are telling the story. Adding more to the
complexity are the comments made by a sociologist.
Walker Evans (1903–1975) is one of the most influential
photographers of the twentieth century and inspired
artists such as Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus,
and Lee Friedlander. Among other things, he is credited
with visually capturing the development of modern
America in its vernacular expressions from roadside
stands to advertising signage from the late 1920s to the
early 1970s. In addition to his artistic accomplishments,
he also lectured at elite American universities and,
in1965, became a photography professor at Yale.
Walker Evans himself, and his richly rewarding visual and
textual oeuvre, presents an important challenge to both
aesthetic as well as visual sociological analysis. Since hers
is the briefest, I begin here with Walker Evans: No Politics
by Stephanie Schwartz, Lecturer in the Department of
History of Art at University College London. It is a book
which is anything but not political.
Schwartz’s approach is a stark contrast to that of Svetlana
Alpers’ Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch. As will be
discussed in the next review section, Schwartz does not
construct her own Walker to analyse, as does Alpers, but
focusses more directly on his work itself. In a way, she
looks closely at a thick visual slice of him instead of
trying to digest his complex self as a whole.
To place his work in relation to the history of
documentary, modernism, politics, and labour, her
lodestone is Evans’s 1933 Cuba portfolio. It was his
first major commission to take photographs to
Book Reviews 705
illustrate Carleton Beals’s ideologically biased The
Crime of Cuba. Evans was expected to document
Cuba’s upheaval, but instead visually captured scenes
and poses of ordinary people. Evans refused to bear
witness, and Schwartz’s book is about that refusal;
‘Why hit the streets in the midst of a revolution and
produce such a banal record? Why work for hire and
refuse to do the work?’ (2) This attitude continued
throughout his life. Schwartz follows with thick
commentary on his works between the 1930s and the
1960s, as well as those he began in the 1930s and
finished or remade in the 1960s. She argues that his
intellectual history is that of the American
documentary itself which also emerged in the 1930s.
Schwartz challenges the reader with detailed studies of
some of his photobooks as well as modern
photography’s most canonical texts. These raise issues
of representation and, more critically, how
documentaries serve to create history via visual
narration. After discussing Evan’s final portfolio,
Message from the Interior, of 12 photos taken between
1931 and 1962, upon which he reworked and
republished, she concludes:
Thus to end here, in the 1970s, is to confront
again the problem that has shaped this study of
Evan’s work: his obsession with the relationship
between photography and history, with the
ways in which many histories of photography
‘submerged,’ to use his word, photography’s
history. For Evans, as I have argued throughout
these pages, this submergence was a political
act. It closed down the possibility of writing
history differently. Therein lies the political
valence of Evan’s work and his legacy. His work
offers a model of history, not of ethical action or
armchair convictions …
In short, the work of a photographer has always been
political, even when it is Evans’s politics of ‘no politics
whatever’ (237).
Let me turn now to Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch
by Svetlana Alpers, Professor Emerita of the History of
Art at the University of California, Berkeley. Although
she also fills much space on Evans Cuba portfolio, her
book is much more ambitious and is perhaps more
valuable for visual social sciences. Ironically I start here
with her Afterword, where she repeats Evans cryptic
quote about his 1947 retrospective at the Art Institute of
Chicago ‘Photography has nothing to do with art, but it’s
an art for all that’ (211). Her book is all about making the
connections between Evans, his work, and art, and my
706 Book Reviews
own sense is that he might not recognise himself in the
portrait she paints of him. Before the preface begins,
Evans is introduced by 143 finely reproduced black and
white captioned photographs separate. These are
numbered and referred to in the later pages and there are
many other of his images and those of others embedded
and discussed directly in the text.
According to Alpers, ‘Photography isn’t a matter of
taking pictures. It’s matter of having an eye’ (1). And she
stresses the ‘eye’ of Evans, who was not a photographer
but a writer who wrote with his camera. Like other
photographers at the time, Evans was self-taught in the
visual arts. His own style emerged from his writing and
literature and I could not help but compare the ‘eye’ of
sociologists to that of photographers. For Alpers,
photographs contain ‘ … an excess of visual information’
(72). Similarly, I think of images as data to be
sociologically analysed, so what is ‘seen,’ versus what is
looked for or found, is critical for the study of vernacular
landscapes for which Evans is widely celebrated (Krase,
Ballesta, and de Larminat 2020).
I was especially attracted to his focus on the ordinary; an
example of which can be found in a 1974 Yale interview,
when he said, ‘A garbage can, occasionally, to me at least,
can be beautiful … . I lean towards the enchantment, the
visual power, of the esthetically rejected subject’ (2).
Although my preference was to ‘see’ more of Evans
himself and his work than of Alpers’ idiosyncratic Evans,
in her dissection in Chapter 4, ‘Evans’ America: Life and
Art,’ I learned how his editing, arranging, and captioning
images changed their meaning. Evans was also a
storyteller and a ruthless editor of his own visual, oral,
and written work. To create her Walker Evans and his
‘eye,’ Alpers spends a great of time on the photographic,
artistic, and literary influences on him and different
stages in his life. For example, he had a disruptive family
and academic life in America and his midwestern family
sent him to France for a year where he disguised ‘ …
himself as French – in life, in dress, and in writing’ (13).
Consequently, the influences of Charles Baudelaire,
Gustave Flaubert, and Eugene Atget made indelible
marks on his work. Alpers analysed Evans’s work
employing the techniques used to critique paintings. For
example, she used Paul Cezanne and Edward Hopper’s
prints to describe and compare Evans’ spatial
compositions between figures. She also noted that Evans
admired other well-known photographers such as
Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Alfred Steiglitz.
As literature was at the heart of his work, she also
documented Evans’ relationships with Ernest
Hemmingway, Elizabeth Bishop, and William Faulkner.
As did many other unemployed artists who would
later become famous, during the Great Depression,
Evans worked for Roosevelt’s Works Progress
Administration. Alpers’ commentary also reveals an
ethical issue for visual sociologists. For example, in
1936, working for ‘Fortune Magazine’ he and writer
James Agee documented the abject poverty of white
tenant farmer families in Alabama (Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men 1941). Sometimes Evans hid his
camera or took shots of unaware people. However,
Alpers wrote, ‘despite the poverty in which the
families lived, Evans’s portraits gave the people
dignity, showed them respect’ (150). Again, between
1938 and 1941, Evans hid his camera as he
photographed New York City subway riders. As
Alpers writes,
There is something eerie about the repetition of
so many isolated, pale, fixed faces, most heads
topped by a period hat and set on bodies rigidly
placed against the windows, their frames, and
the signage of a subway car … . It is not only
their anonymity but their being unaware of
being seen that makes the people look strange.
(158,159)
Late in life, he was drawn to the, not quite iPhone, rapid
imagery of the Polaroid SX-70 camera. Here Alpers
brings in Thomas S. Kuhn (1962) to explain why
revolutionary style changes in art, as in science, are so
difficult and implies, at least to me, that new technology
is what makes change possible (207).
Finally, I must admit that doing justice to Schwartz and
Alpers’ rich texts is impossible even in an extremely long
review essay. In some places, it obviously is also well
beyond my ken.
REFERENCES
Krase, Jerome, Jordi Ballesta, and Eliane de Larminat. 2020.
“Visual Sociology of the Vernacular Urban Landscape.”
Les manières de faire vernaculaires: Vernacular Ways,
Interfaces: Image, Text, Language 44. https://journals.
openedition.org/interfaces/1437.
Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
© 2022 Jerome Krase
https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2022.2043180