Toward the end of his life, Walker Evans began using a Polaroid camera. The images he photographed were distinct from the stark black-and-white shots he built his name on in the 30s and 40s. He’s still best known for his overpowering image of the Brooklyn Bridge breaking the cityscape in two; mournful empty bedrooms; skeptical passersby on the street; and, most famously, the impoverished Southerner tenant farmers whose careworn faces served as a companion to James Agee’s prose in their 1941 collaboration, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. By contrast, the Polaroid shots had an eerie warmth to them. The instant camera had its shortcomings — bleached colors and imprecision — but he found an elegance in street arrows and faces and junkyard detritus. The photos served as a curious and elegiac capstone to a career that ended with his death in 1975.
“The SX-70’s simplicity and immediacy allowed Walker to turn his thoughts and feelings, conscious and preconscious, into images before his eyes,” Michael Lesy writes in Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories, which strives to elevate and put some context around Evans’ late work. Lesy and Evans met in the early 70s when both were teaching at Yale. By then Evans no longer had the same presence in American photography he once did, but in a way that was liberating, and the flexibility the camera gave him was a useful tool for his seeking spirit. He’d long vocally rejected color photography; here was an opportunity to play with new forms of contrast. His hallmark was once capturing the impassive faces of people who’d done some hard living; now his mood had softened, and he was looking for something more sensitive and lyrical. “By the end of his life, Walker was holding his camera so close to people’s faces, he may have been trying to see their souls behind their eyes,” Lesy writes.
[View of Architecture and Signage, Possibly Chicago, 1940s-50s, the Metropolitan Museum of Art]
Lesy is celebrating a friend in writing. He acknowledges Evans’ moods and difficulties, but the book overall has a hagiographic tint. Yet as much as Lesy is saluting Evans, in equal measure he’s doing the same for the snapshot. In that sense, this new book is a companion to Lesy’s Snapshots 1971-77 (2021), an assortment of casual photos drawn from a large cache he came to own while living in the Bay Area. By comparison, Evans’ photos are more considered, more alert to matters of shape, form, and emotion. But he wasn’t trying to push the Polaroid into the realm of art photography so much as enjoy the frisson of high and low created by an acute observer deploying a device built for play and speed. There’s a lot of simple pathos in the shots Lesy collects: dilapidated facades, a crumbling mannequin, a gravesite. But he’s plainly enjoying himself, too. A garden gnome with its conical cap removed, its bald pate blinding white. The front panel of a 50’s Ford truck abandoned in a field, its white grille gleaming like a cartoon monster rising from the earth. And all of those soul-seeking images of faces, restful, hanging back, smoking, their eyes calm and curious.
If Lesy has an overarching interest in writing this book beyond the Polaroids (which had already been collected for a 2002 book), it’s in showing the lifelong intersection of Evans’ work with the people who in various ways supported it. The bulk of the book’s prose are vignettes of friends, patrons, and colleagues, accompanied by Evans’ portraits of them. The painter Hanns Skolle, who encouraged him to shoot his iconic 1929 image of the Brooklyn Bridge. His wife of 15 years, Jane Smith Ninas. Lincoln Kirstein, a handsome model and wealthy patron who created the journal Hound and Horn and encouraged Evans to write about photography. They’re friends, though often the mood of the images is a tick confrontational; they peer into Evans’ lens skeptically, facing a challenge.
42nd Street, 1929, the Metropolitan Museum of Art
But James Agee, who by necessity occupies much of the book’s attention, cuts a different figure in both images and prose. In 1936, the two were both working at Fortune magazine, introduced to each other by the critic Dwight Macdonald, and the two were sent to the South to cover the impact of the Great Depression. For Henry Luce’s Fortune of the time, such a project was poverty-porn lagniappe, something artsy to fill the feature well. (For years after, Lesy notes, the magazine cleared space for Evans’ photo essays “every once in a while, to prove its good taste.”) The size, form, and political posture of what became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men far outstripped what the magazine wanted. But it clarified Evans’s sense of himself as an artist: “Light and shape, clarity and form; objects at rest in the space around them became the elements of Evans’s visual language,” Lesy writes.
Lesy includes images from that historic trip: tenant farmers in repose, looking somewhere in the distance, weathered but dignified. Although shot in black and white with clear focus, they’re not especially distinct in mood and mission from the late Polaroids, which is part of Lesy’s unspoken point. History now frames Evans as an early- to mid-century phenomenon, a precursor to Robert Frank and Diane Arbus. Lesy wants to emphasize that he was a lifelong poet of loneliness and desolation. Every face he photographed, be it in 1929 or 1973, was caught seeking something; every inanimate object a symbol of a need unmet.
Headless Mannequin in Yard, November 1973. The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“No hypocrisies,” Lesy writes of Agee’s and Evans’s approach to the Famous Men project. “No cant. No evasions. They would not pander. They would not look away.” His 70’s portraits capture that same vulnerability, even if the subjects weren’t so photojournalistic. A wooden beach chair, so flimsy that even looking at it seems like it might speed its collapse. A post office sign faded to the point of near unrecognizability. A railcar at the end of a track that’s either abandoned or poised to move only in one direction: away from the viewer. The Polaroid may have been dismissed for its imprecision and disposability. But it was the perfect format for an artist who recognized ephemerality, whose images were infused with the idea that all things end.
[Published by Blast Books on October 28, 2022, 176 pages, $45.00 US hardcover]
Virginia Hubbard Holding Her Son, 1974, J. Paul Getty Museum