Walker Evans: More Voracious Than Merely Famished
Walker Evans; Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye; Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, text; Thames&Hudson; 368 pages; colour and monochrome photographs. It's a minor tragedy for photography that Walker Evans' masterworks, American Photographs and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, have been out of print for so long. This is a bit like the finest novels of William Faulkner or F. Scott Fitzgerald utterly vanishing off the face of the Earth. However, The Hungry Eye goes some way toward redressing the imbalance by giving us selections from all his major projects. Evans stands beside his contemporaries, Stieglitz, Steichen and Strand, as one of the shapers of the American photography of this century. But the subtlety of his work can lead to an all too easy dismissal by viewers looking for quick-hit visual thrills, and there is a misperception that he was "just" a documentary photographer. Look at his photographs with the knowledge Evans was a Sorbonne-educated, frustrated novelist, and their deep layers of literature-like content become clear. Written 1995. © Copyright Karl-Peter Gottschalk 1997.