Leica SL Review

Leica has introduced the new SL camera, and the Internet is ablaze, or abuzz, or something. Everyone is reviewing this thing. I guess I better step up.

With this camera, Leica is attempting to merge two separate lines of artistic inquiry, the experiment with gigantism in the Leica S is merged with the boxy planarity of the original M models. To these basic elements, we add a strong dose of Bauhaus modernism blended with something like Soviet Brutalism, creating an architecture that is somehow simultaneously sleek and blunt, slender and massive.

The almost total lack of surface texture and the hard angles (the design has nary a single radius, it appears to be constructed entirely out of featureless black planes intersecting in mathematically sharp lines, it frankly makes me want to pick up some sort of large bone and brain a friend) seem a nod to 1970s hifi design, perhaps a hearkening back what is now the distant past, that ambiguous era of heavy distortion and bad shoes, somewhere between the bright color of the 1960s and the cheerfully false plastic of the 1980s.

Or are we seeing something different, something a touch more sinister? In the view of this author that 1970s hifi look could as easily be a nod to H&K's design language. Combined with the obvious Soviet design influences, one cannot help but feel something a little military, a little nasty, in here. Is this thing a metaphor for a tank, or for rock&roll? Or is it playing with some unmentionable dialectic between the two, somehow?

One thing is certain, the SL is a gigantic, and I mean that literally, "Fuck You" to Jony Ive.

Review: The Idea of Man from Ming Thein

Let me begin by acknowledging my prejudices here. I have them, they're real. I shall attempt to set them aside, and I probably shan't entirely succeed. Such is life.

Why review this online version of Ming's Chicago gallery show? I've been working on this thesis that you can't assemble a powerful body of work ex post facto and here we have an attempt to do just that. Ming's going big here, with a big idea, a big theme. I refuse, flatly, to deduct points for the bigness of the theme. If you're going to do this sort of thing, if you're going to take a swing at a serious body of work, props to you for going big. Sally Mann took a swing at "Death" and she's awesome, so there.

It's a big idea, it's a strong theme, I say bloody well go for it. I will root for you, regardless. And I do. Go Ming, Go.

Onwards.

The three facets of the show, interstitial text, photographs, and titles (captions?) all appear to me to be only vaguely supporting one another, often fighting, and in one notable instance working very very well indeed, about which more anon.

Ming mentions that the captions are important (I assume here that he means the titles, but possibly I am missing something on his flickr account). The titles, to my eye, often contradict the interstitial text describing the group the picture belongs to. In a couple of cases, the title is necessary to make sense of why a picture is in the group at all. In many cases the title appears to be irrelevant, and in at least one it's simply pointing out the not-very-obvious visual joke (which joke appears to be unconnected to any of the larger themes). If I could simply dismiss the titles, I would, but they're necessary to make sense of a couple of the pictures.

Reworking the titles to either consistently point the way to an interpretation of the picture that makes sense in context, or to more consistently contradict the context to provide a contrapuntal voice, or really any sort of organizing principle would be a big step up, if you must have titles. Also, making the titles be thought bubble instead of DSC_0127817.JPG thought bubble copy.jpg would be a bit of a step forward right there, but that's sort of a nit.

The interstitial text speaks of really quite universal themes of conformity, rebellion, self-discovery. It's a big idea, and a good one. On close inspection, though, this text describes a sequence so specific as to feel personal. Ming appears to be simply talking about himself. This work would feel more universal organized as un-ordered groups, rather than a sequence of growth.

Many of the photos are simply filler. Strong leading lines pointing to a lone silhouette. Ok, I get it. A Human, How does this particular lone silhouette relate to this idea, when the very similar lone silhouette apparently relates to a different idea?

In general, this whole thing comes across as an essay about a personal journey, presented as a sort of allegory, illustrated by stock photographs. In some cases, very well chosen stock photos. He does do some interesting things with color, and the relative size of the subject in the frame, things that really work quite well. The larger, out of focus figures in the fifth group, about Self, really works pretty well here.

The exceptional picture is the shadow of the violinist. By itself, this is a pretty standard shadow play picture. Loads of idiots have shot a million variations on this thing. In context, however, I am willing to declare it excellent bordering on genius. As an expression of We know our new identity, but we must persevere to fit in and find our niche, our community, the 7th group, it's simply outstanding. This is a picture which, in the context of the greater body of work, is elevated in precisely the way I like to see, in precisely the "greater than the sum of the parts" way that exemplifies a strong body of work.

Overall, if you deleted all the text, the show would work OK as an expression of isolation, of separateness. This is largely because the point of view is, in virtually every frame, one of someone who is separate. Note that most of the figures are back-to the camera, and many of them are very far away. These are pictures taken by a guy who is physically and psychologically separate.

Without the text to give the theme, though, the stellar violinist photo becomes boring.

I don't think this could be reworked into an important show, in any meaningful way. It could be enormously improved by culling several of the more redundant pictures, re-titling everything to make sense, and re-organizing the interstitial text. Still, it works better than I expected, and the violinist was almost shocking to me.

If this were mine, I'd throw out everything but the violinist's shadow, I'd rewrite the interstitial text to be about three universal themes in no particular order, and then I'd go shoot them hell out of those three themes specifically.

Review: TJ's Camera Bag

This is my camera bag. When I need to carry my camera, or my camera and some other gear, from one place to another, this is often what I use. It's manufactured for Trader Joe's, to their specifications, and it works wonderfully.

As you can see, it easily has enough space for my Nikon D3100 and the Micro-Nikkor 60mm lens, with plenty of room left over for filters, cables, speedlites, and so on. Sometimes, I even put a sandwich in there:

You can see that I also use the GreySlow NoStrap strap product thing. My father used it, so I use it.

The bag is a little light on the padding, but so far, so good. Not being a professional, well, if the camera breaks it's not the end of the world. Mainly I try to avoid smashing the bag in to stuff, and so far it's working pretty well for me.

Here's the bag in use:

Note the ShurGrip(tm) cloth handles. That's my patented grip, though. You have to pay me if you want to hold your bag that way.

Note: I actually do carry my cameras around in this sort of bag. Have for years.

Karsh at the National Portrait Gallery

I seem to fall, always, into the general idea that Karsh wasn't very good. Then I happen upon an exhibition of his work and I remember that it's not so at all, he was very good. Very good indeed. Now that I am old and sophisticated, perhaps it will stick this time around.

The pictures in this show are mostly black and whites, mainly of famous people. I gather that the exhibition will rotate prints in and out, which seems very confusing. If I read the notes properly, Karsh's widow gave a rather large collection to the National Portrait Gallery (why the US one? Karsh was Ottawa based. Surely the Canadians are annoyed!) and this is a subset of those. A few dozen portraits, including some very well known ones.

The dramatic light and large format gives us a wealth of the wrinkles and tiny features that we call "character" in every face. These are nothing like the traditional airbrushed messes we see from lower end commercial guys (Karsh was, after all, commercial). These are all a riot of details, both flattering and unflattering.

Post any of these on an internet forum, and you'd get a huge raft of shit. Plugged up blacks, chopped off limbs, hot spots all over the place. You really need more fill light. You ought to have a hair light. The framing is either too tight or way too loose. Blah blah blah blah. In short, these look nothing like Senior Portraits from LifeTouch Studios.

What Karsh accomplishes with these pictures is wildly beyond the reach of most amateurs, and most low end commercial portraitists. These pictures create a powerful impression that you, the viewer, know the subject a little. Indeed, many of these pictures did a great deal to create our conception of these people. Hitchcock is a haughty auteur, Churchill a glowering lion. This is of course a construct, this is the image of the subject that Karsh chose to make and to keep. Walt Disney was not an affable fellow at all, but this portrait makes us believe that he is.

I think, based on these pictures and on a short film I saw decades ago, that Karsh worked much like a street photographer does. Rather than soaking up the rhythms of the street and learning to feel its flows and patterns, Karsh instead worked with the subject in the same way. He must have learned the patterns, the ebb and flow of emotion and body language in the subject, and was then able to wait.. wait.. and then click at precisely the moment, the decisive moment, the moment when there was a picture, the picture, the one Karsh wanted.

A profile of Snowden I read recently suggests much the same of him.

It is this that separates a good portraitist from a bad one. All the lights in the world, all the strobist studying in the world, won't help you be good if you can't get in synch with the subject, if you can't press the button, click, at the decisive moment.

Conversely, if you can, any god damned lighting at all is fine.

Unfortunately, while lots of people will teach you a bunch of useless shit about lighting, skills that will launch your career right into the bottom end of the portrait market, nobody seems to have any insight into how to work with the subject.

Garry Winogrand at the National Gallery of Art

There's a pretty substantial retrospective of Garry Winogrand on now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. I happened to be in town for a few days with the kids, and managed to take an hour and stop by.

There's a large number of photographs shown in more or less chronological order, from the beginning to the end. 1950s through early 1980s. We get to see a substantial stylistic evolution. Many of the pictures have never been seen before, and probably many more had been seen but not by me. There were certainly samples of styles I had not seen from Winogrand before, at both ends of his career.

I had never seen (much of?) his early photojournalistic work, which struck me as workmanlike, competent, but unremarkable. No particular trace of Winogrand, just a good picture of this politician at that event. I, and everyone else, had never seen much of his later work, about which more shortly.

Also included in the exhibit, as I suppose one must, were various papers and so on. Winogrand's application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, as well as several contact sheets about which, also, more shortly.

A final preliminary note: The curators helpfully noted by each print whether Winogrand had had it printed in his lifetime, whether he had at least marked the frame on a contact sheet, or whether someone else had selected the frame (often because the film was developed posthumously, I suppose?). The curators selecting frames did a good job. I tried to discern some difference between photographs selected by curators and photographs selected by Winogrand, and could not. They seemed to be good pictures, mostly, but not the best pictures. Representative, good, but not remarkable. It's possibly, barely, that the curators picked slightly better frames on average than Winogrand did. However, I am prejudiced here, and not to be trusted.

I was struck by a few things.

I recognized most of the really good ones. I've seen them before. This was not, to my eye, anything like an unearthing of a marvelous trove of outstanding work. The few dozen really good ones might be all the really good ones that there are in Winogrand's oeuvre, at least as far as this exhibition shows us. There's tons of quite decent pictures, there's tons of pictures with a bit of interest, that look quite "Winogrand", that show off one or another of his tropes. There just aren't all that many truly excellent pictures here.

I'm on the record as wondering how much of his really good work was deliberate, and how much was simply the result of skillfully curating an enormous collection of random snaps. I have come to the conclusion that while curation surely played a large role, the underlying enormous collection of pictures from 1960 to 1980 must have been shot with some ability. How much I don't know, but there must have been some clarity of vision, some ideas, some deliberation, however large or small.

I believe this, now, because I have also seen what happened when Garry Winogrand truly did start firing away at random.

The work at the tail end is frankly tragic. It looks exactly like the pictures that might be selected by a curator from a large heap of rolls of film shot out the window of a moving car, more or less at random, by a man driving aimlessly around Los Angeles. The curators helpfully wrote up some text to accompany some of the pictures "the speed of the car echoing the blah blah in contrast to the static blah blah blah" the worst sort of art school horseshit. These appear to be junky random shapshots of nothing, shot carelessly.

Looking at the contact sheets we learn why. It's because these are junky random shapshots of nothing, shot carelessly. Winogrand clearly was shooting anything that looked like it might evolve into something. A girl crossing a street (half of what the guy shot in his life was, apparently, girls crossing streets), a car pulls out of a garage, whatever. He seemed attracted to motion, to transitions, which was a good impulse. It allows the curators to pull a few dozen pictures that they can sell as credible out of the 90,000 or so undeveloped frames left at Winogrand's death.

I don't really care to guess what was driving Winogrand here, but it's certainly consistent with a guy who just couldn't stop squeezing the shutter button. Was it a compulsion, was it just habit, was it some sort of complex half-assery about the way he viewed or related to the world? I don't know, but whatever was driving him, his work from the 1980s is nothing.

Winogrand's estate would have served the man better if they'd simply swept the last few years of stuff under the rug and forgotten it. Tragic development accident, such a loss, we'll never know what work he did, etc, etc.

Ultimately, the retrospective clarifies some things, and muddies others. It calls into question the entire body of work, while at the same time proving that there was actually something there in the middle years, by showing so clearly its absence in both the earlier and the later years.

Alfred Stieglitz Camera Work: A Pictorial Guide

Alfred Stieglitz Camera Work
A Pictorial Guide
Edited by Marianna Fulton Margolis.

This book is intended as a more or less academic index to the pictures in Alfred Stieglitz' seminal quarterly "Camera Work", published from 1903 to 1917 over a total of 50 issues. The present book contains all 559 pictures reproduced in that periodical, in chronological order. They are neatly indexed, and contain some somewhat compressed but useful notes on such things as the reproduction method used (in the original) for each picture. There are some opening notes that give some context, and which explain the system of notation throughout. At the end several indices are found: By artist, by title, and by sitter.

I am personally not terribly interested in this book itself, although it is clearly a useful and important resource for the relevant historians. I am interested in the book for the pictures it contains. It takes almost no research whatsoever to learn that "Camera Work" is among the most important bodies of work in the history of photography, especially photography as art. Even in the broader context of Art as Art, it is not an unimportant body of work, as it brought forth not only a great body of photography but also other works by Matisse, Rodin, and Picasso (at least).

My edition of this book has four pictures per page, on a pretty big page, which yields pictures perhaps 3 to 5 inches on a side. The reproductions in this book are also suspiciously similar looking in their renditions. Whether this simply reflects the aesthetic of "Camera Work" itself, or is in part the result of some of the pre-press handling of the pictures for this book, I do not venture to guess. Regardless, this is not really a book to get for the quality of the reproductions. They are adequate, but not excellent. Happily, most of the pictures in here are superb enough to stand up well in spite of less than perfect reproduction. The stylistic choices made by the artists are perfectly clear. Some hint of the various photographic processes used in the originals comes through, enough to get the flavor of it. Seeing some originals, by way of giving you some visual information to fill in the gaps, as it were, would do you no harm. But, as a for instance, I had no trouble instantly recognizing the work for Frederick Evans, even though no platinum was used in these reproductions.

The book's very compactness lets the reader quickly skim the entire body of work represented by "Camera Work", which is a very useful and interesting experiment to perform. What strikes me most about the work is the small evidence of progression. Much has been made of Stieglitz' evolution as a photographer and an editor, but it is frankly not particularly apparent in this book. There is some evolution. Surely some evolution is obscured by the non-chronological nature of the works presented, the magazine would back-track from time to time, to show us older work. Nonetheless, there is, to my eye always greater variation between the artists shown than between the early issues and the late. A few ideas drop out over time, there are no heavily manipulated negatives, no masses of scratches, by the later issues, for instance. For the most part, though, a great breadth of excellent work is shown, and the excellent work in 1917 was not all that visually different from the excellent work in 1903.

The lone exception, and it is an exception, is that Paul Strand's work dominates the end. The last issue (possible several issues?) were all Paul Strand. This does not strike the reader as particularly the endpoint of an evolution, but rather another radical leap in a new direction, similar to the magazine's reproductions of paintings and so on. Strand's work is almost completely different from almost everything else in the periodical. It's possible, though, that this last stage has been viewed as the last stage of a natural evolution. It's even possible that it is, and that the other stages are simply not clear to me.

Readers with suitable backgrounds will already know that "Camera Work" was a major outlet for Pictorialists. The magazine published dozens of portraits inspired by Rembrandt, and dozens of scenes inspired by JWM Turner. Not all the pictures in "Camera Work" look like paintings, but a lot of them do. What's missing, happily, is the worst of the Victorian sentiment.

This is, to my eye, the "good stuff" of the Pictorialist aesthetic. Photographs that look like paintings, nothing more, nothing less. Good photographs, not crummy fake looking messes.

They're really pretty good.

They look almost nothing like anything being shot today.

Buy this book! It's cheap, and good, and will be a wonderful addition to your library, caveats indicated above.

Susan Sontag, On Photography

In 1977 Susan Sontag published a collection of essays entitled On Photography. This book is, quite rightly, considered to be an important body of thought on the subject of Photographs and Photography. I review it now, as is my wont, some decades later.

The essays in the book were previously, separately, published, and so there is a certain amount of repeated material and thought across them. Sontag covers the same ideas over and over, but the repetition is not particularly offensive or irritating in the book. Her ideas are sometimes somewhat vague and, to my mind, poorly presented and supported. The repetition gives a sort of parallax view of what she's getting at, which is useful and important.

The most prominent theme present in the book is that Susan Sontag is very smart and knows a lot of things. It's not quite a New Yorker film review, but it's tending in that direction. These were essays written by a writer living in New York City, for other people living in New York City. The only two topics that really seem to go over well with that crowd are: Goodness, I Am Very Very Smart, and New York City Is Very Awesome, Isn't It? So, it is no surprise, really, to find this theme so thoroughly expounded. Despite all this, she manages to bring up some very good ideas, and discuss quite a few interesting things.

The next most important ideas that she hammers on a fair bit is the two contradictory views of photography espoused by photographers and the photographic intelligentsia. On the one hand, photographs represent and reveal that which is true and real. On the other hand, photographs are Art with a capital A and therefore reveal.. other things.. ideas, the photographer, some sort of higher truth, anything and everything but the proximate subject. In this age of digital photography and digital editing this seems a little trite, but vestiges of this conflict remain with us in, for instance, the world of photojournalism. There certainly remain photographers who insist that their images reveal truth, that they tell a true story. The conflict between subject or image as the dominant element remains, however. Is this a picture of a candlestick, or is it an image in which one of the graphically important forms happens to look like a candlestick?

Sontag points out (quite correctly) that photographs alter our perceptions of reality. The fact that photographs look real, and are imprints of reality, (the preceding theme notwithstanding) causes us to freight them with extra veritas. We believe a photograph more easily and thoroughly than a drawing, or a verbal description. In some ways, we see them as more real than the thing itself. Sometimes we have not seen the thing itself, sometimes we saw it for only a moment, sometimes we saw it long ago. The photograph is here, now. It alters our memory of the thing, and our understanding of the thing, more than we know, more than we admit. This is truly the most interesting idea in the book. Sontag's treatment of it goes in to some depth, and she spends a fair bit of time rather presciently pointing out the effects of more and more photographs passing our eyes day by day. She seems, some time before 1977, to have felt tremors of facebook, flickr, instagram, et al resonating down through time to wake her up at night in a cold sweat.

Most controversially, Sontag makes the assertion (repeatedly) that photography is inherently aggressive, appropriative, and damaging to that which it photographs. She mostly states these as truths, giving very little support and very little clarification of what she even means. What is the nature of the damage? She does cite some examples, of photographers damaging indigenous cultures in the act of photographing them through a process of suggesting changes and giving direction. The subjects would, allegedly, alter their dances, costumes, and so on, to comply with the wishes of the hordes of photographers swarming past to document the "dying culture". Arguably Sontag is confusing bad ethnography for an inherent property of photography. My best guess is that she is proceeding from the idea that photographs alter our perception of things to the idea that this change, in and of itself, constitutes damage. Damage, not to the thing, but to our idea of the thing, which idea is in its way much more important than the thing. It's also possible she's simply saying this stuff over and over again to create a sort of platform of repetition upon which to base an assault on pornography, an assault which never came? Whether her conception of the destructiveness of photography is the same as mine we shall never know, but her notion caused me to think it through carefully.

Sontag's thinking is muddled throughout, to be honest. There are such gems as her assertion that the camera creates a new reality, a little copy of part of reality (which is fine so far as it goes and an interesting viewpoint) and in doing so denies that reality is enough. This is the sort of philosophical-sounding fiddle-faddle that gets philosophy a bad name. Making a photograph no more denies that reality is enough than does making a pot of soup. Certainly I felt that reality was not enough - what it needed was soup, on account of I was hungry in this reality, and wanted some soup. It's true, but not very interesting. Every act of change denies the adequacy of reality in exactly the same way, the fact that the camera is making a little copy of reality is irrelevant. It certainly sounds cool, though.

The book is a maze of this sort of thing.

The value is not really in that Sontag has it all figured out, but that she's a veritable river of weird ideas, many of which are true in some sense. You simply have to do all the spade work yourself, and sort out what's nonsense and what's true. The value in her book is really in the spade work you are forced to do to make sense of it all. I believe we call this sort of thing "thought provoking."

FSA Photo of the Week

Here we go:

FSA Photo of the.. random time interval

Here's a portrait:

Suzanne Opton at the Chrysler Museum

Suzanne Opton has a show at the Chrysler Museum here in Norfolk, VA. The show is Many Wars but also has a couple of images from another concept, Soldier. The main show consists of 19 life-sized 3/4 length portraits of military veterans. The two images from Soldier are representative of that concept - much larger than life size headshots of active duty soldiers, their head lying on a table so the face is presented horizontally.

The images from Soldier are interesting, but extremely ambiguous. I get no sense of what the artist is aiming for here, and suspect that she is hoping that the enormous prints and ruthless detail will say something for her.

The Many Wars collection of portraits of veterans is much more artistically clear. The color palette is deliberately chosen to echo that of certain eras of paintings: rich reddish browns, and so on. The subjects are, with one exception, shot in a life sized 3/4 length portrait, themselves wrapped in a length of upholstery fabric, against a simple hanging fabric background. The one exception is a bit of a puzzle, it is the oldest looking of the bunch, a WWII veteran, who is wrapped in pure white fluffy material and, unlike the other subjects, shows no sign of wearing anything else. Although the print is the same size, the framing is much closer, something like 2 times life sized. Interestingly, this print is hung in the same place the odd-print-out in the Baldwin Lee show was hung. Is this the Chrysler's designated "we don't know what to make ot this one" spot? Perhaps the image represents a connection with the Soldier images, or perhaps the artist simply liked the old guy's look so much she wanted him bigger.

The images are pretty much transparent, in the sense that one doesn't much see the photography. The lighting is straightforward, the colors are muted and pleasant, setting a tone unobtrusively. What one sees is the subjects, these 18 men and 1 woman, each with their own 1000 yard stare. Some confront the camera, posing with clenched fists, others seem mid-conversation, often talking with their hands. Others appear lost in their own world. The overall effect is definitely powerful. These are people who have seen some shit, and done some shit, make no mistake. This comes through with crystal clarity.

There are some problems with the show. Of the nineteen images, 17 are white men, one is an ambiguously non-white guy, and one is a woman. This isn't representative of our veterans, at all. These were shot at a PTSD treatment program in, I think, Vermont, which explains but does not excuse the demographic breakdown. Further, the subjects were all undergoing treatment for PTSD, and many of them have been more or less recently, homeless. This raises the question: Are these photographs of damaged vets, or photographs of homeless people? There's a large overlap between the two populations, but they're not the same. I think the show could have done a better job of addressing the demographic problem, and the issue of homelessness. Had it done so, it would have been much stronger for it.

As it is, the show falls into a grey area between commentary, and outright exploitation of the subjects. As commentary, the show is modestly strong, but falls well short of what it could have been. With the equipment, the subjects, and the extremely coherent and strong visual concept all present, I think the artist could have and should have made a stronger statement here. Instead, she appears to have fallen back into the lazy "we'll print them really big so they look like art" attitude so common today. It would not be unfair to say that Opton has failed her subjects with this show.

Finally, a remarkable piece of serendipity. When I went to look at the show again recently, one of the lights was out. These images are lit with pretty straightforward museum lighting, a spot to illuminate the frame evenly with minimized reflections. With the light out on one of the images, the effect was completely different and quite startling. The transparency was gone, I no longer skipped past the photograph directly to the subject. Now I was confronted with a figure almost lost in the gloom. Reflected in the glass were the two photographs mounted on the wall behind me. After a moment I saw my own reflection, a black silhouette. No longer was this a solitary figure, emotionally naked before me, this was a grouping of figures, one almost lost in darkness, and one of which was me.

It would utterly subvert the artist's intent, I think, to relight the show, but it would be artistically much stronger with tiny spotlights on faces or hands (the hands were often far more expressive than faces). I cannot imagine what the effect of this imagined show would be, as commentary or exposition. Stronger? Weaker? I would have to see it to know.

FSA Photo of the week

This might actually be a pretty well known photograph. It's certainly a kind of photograph that's very well known:

FSA Photo of the Week

Something a little more timeless?

FSA Photo of the Week

I may as well just define a week to be 8 days long.

FSA Photo of the week

Here ya go:

FSA photo of the week

Here it is, a day late:

Walker Evans: American Photographs

In keeping with my track record of reviewing books only decades after they are published, I will now record my thoughts on the 75th anniversary edition of Walker Evans' seminal book, American Photographs.

This book contains 87 photographs, in two sections. They are presented with no accompanying text whatsoever, only a number referring to a very brief descriptive text for each photograph at the end of each of the two sections. The reproductions are quite nice, and the book is incredibly cheap - less than $US25 at the moment. It might be one of the best values out there.

There are two essays included with the current edition. The first, on the making of the current edition, is a fascinating glimpse into the problems inherent in re-making a book of photographs after 25 years. Technology advances, and photographs are lost or harder to obtain. The second essay was included in the original edition, and is a discussion of the work and the photographer, written by a friend of Evans, Lincoln Kerstein. I found it somewhat labored and not particularly interesting. It is probably more of interest for the snapshot it gives us of how Evans was viewed in his time, than of much current interest.

I have mostly been familiar with Evans through is FSA work, and the work he did nominally for the FSA but in reality for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (which was a collaboration with James Agee). The current volume gives us a much broader view of the photographer's work. These photographs were, for the most part, selected for the book by Evans himself to accompany an exhibit of his photographs in 1938, so we're probably still not looking at a fully representative view of his work.

The first thing that struck me, looking through this work, was how relatively poor it was. This is not to say the work is bad, it certainly is not. However, it fares poorly when stacked up next to the towering, gigantic, monumental work he did for the book with Agee. The work is still excellent and well worth your time to look at carefully. The second thing that struck me was the breadth of Evans' work. There are at least two different photographers in Walker Evans, the view camera man and the 35mm man. While it's not a perfect correlation, the work with the smaller camera is much looser, in some sense. There's a number of images that flirt with "street" while being, ultimately, documentary. The view camera work is generally more formal, each image having a very deliberate feeling of structure.

The subject matter is all over the place. The title of the book is apt, Evans work here seems to have been an honest stab at capturing the breadth of the nation, in some interesting sense. There are people, street scenes, architecture, still lifes, and strange things drawn, painted, or glued to walls. There are very few landscapes, which is telling in a book of this title. Evans seems to have felt that America is in her people, their belongings, their buildings, their streets.

Buy it, keep it near. It's superb.

FSA Photo of the Week

Here it is:

FSA Photo of the Week

Here we go:

FSA Photo of the Week

FSA Photo of the week