Walker Evans Exibit (digitally)

[Walter Foscari]

Interesting NY Times article on the new Walker Evans exibit. Digital prints from the original negs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/arts/design/25evan.html?ref=arts

[Brian Ellis]

I was just getting ready to post the same link myself. I stumbled across the article and read it hoping to learn more about the technology used to make the prints. I didn't find anything like that but ended up finding the article much more interesting and thought-provoking than if it had simply provided the technical details.

[paulr]

interesting article. brings up issues that come up whenever a printer reinterprets someone's work.

i'm not sure i agree with the author that lush printing is inapropriate for evans' work. i see his point, but my experience with evans' vintage prints suggest that many were austere, but some were rich and traditionally beautiful. i like the beautiful ones ... for me the tension between the baren subject and the lush presentation works. Richard Misrach once commented that you can't draw someone in with an ugly picture ... so there's little point in ugly presentation of an ugly reality. something like that. Milan Kundera said something similar. Ritualization and beautification are how we use art to understand horrors. And it's worth noting all the other elements of Evans' picture making--his use of form and framing, for instance--are elegant and beautiful.

i suppose the most interesting point in the article is that we can all get these prints, for not a lot of money. i'm thinking about it!

http://www.loc.gov/preserv/pds/digital.html

[Walter Foscari]

Quoting from the article: "...Is photography closer to music and theater, or to painting? A painting is what it is, and copies of it are not the same. Music and theater exist through their variety of interpretations... The tricky part is that a listener knows a musician playing Bach is not Bach. Somebody looking at one of these new Evans prints is likely to assume it is by Evans, which it is of course only up to a point. That point is the threshold of the new technology."
It can be argued that this was somewhat true even with the traditional processes. But it's much harder to disagree with this interpretation now that digital technology has so expanded the possibilities.

[Brian Ellis]

"It can be argued that this was somewhat true even with the traditional processes. But it's much harder to disagree with this interpretation now that digital technology has so expanded the possibilities."

I think that's right. The author was seems to be assuming that no one could do better than Evans' from a technical standpoint if they were using the same technology (i.e. darkroom). I don't think that's necessarily true depending on how "better" is defined. But just as an example, variable contrast paper wasn't available in Evans' time and it opens up a lot more options for burning at different contrasts on different parts of the print than Evans had. OTOH, digital is orders of magnitude greater in terms of the technical possibilities than variable contrast paper or other similar darkroom innovations so maybe the author's basic point is correct even if not 100% accurate. Either way, I found it a fascinating article.

[Gordon Coale]

The FSA pictures are all online and the more popular ones are high resolution scans. Check out Walker Evans (http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/S?ammem/fsaall:@FILREQ(@OR(@field(AUTHOR+@od1(Evans,+Walker,+1903-1975,+photographer+))+@field(OTHER+@od1(Evans,+Walker,+1903-1975,+photographer+)))+@FIELD(COLLID+fsa))). Print your own.

[tim atherton]

interesting article. brings up issues that come up whenever a printer reinterprets someone's work.

i'm not sure i agree with the author that lush printing is inapropriate for evans' work. i see his point, but my experience with evans' vintage prints suggest that many were austere, but some were rich and traditionally beautiful. i like the beautiful ones ... for me the tension between the baren subject and the lush presentation works.

In addition, I think many of Evan's prints from this period were made by lab technicians at the FSI/OWI (and later, by students from Yale under his direction etc) - some were probably far better printers than others.

BTW - you can already download some quite good files of these for free (as well as getting them to scan specific items)

I've had some quite nice "Walker Evans" prints on my study wall for a while now (I think there's a guy on ebay selling posters of them too....)