The case of Walker Evans and the alarm clock......

[paulr]

I think it's possible to distinguish the FSA ideology issue from whether Evans was really a "straight" photographer. Actually, separating Evans from the more ideological FSA photographers resolves this issue: Evans clearly manipulated things in his photographs, whatever his claims to the contrary, but this was motivated by the same aesthetic goals that led him to reject Stryker's attempts to get photographs that would be politically "useful."

That sounds like a likely analysis to me. Evans was basically being repurposed as a documentarian ... but he worked the way he always did. If this caused a conflict, it's an open question if the cause was Evans, his boss, or the people who packaged the final product.

Incidentally, I'm not sure rearranging props makes an image less "straight." Does it? I think it just makes it less valid as a document.

[poco]

I had a show of 70 prints of the interior of an abandoned housing project a couple years ago. It was well received and got some good press but one of the "critics" called in preparation of his review to ask how much I manipulated the scenes before photographing them. I told him "only incidentally," but he insisted on further explanation so I gave it to him.

There was a shot that I called "Dreams" in the show -- an empty chair against a wall with a commercial poster of a cruise ship hanging above it and a lottery ticket on the floor, just barely within frame. That ticket wasn't visible from the angle I wanted to take the shot, so I admitted to the guy that I'd nudged it with my toe so it would come into the shot.

Well, the review came out and the guy really focused on this "confession" of scene manipulation. He said a couple nice things, but really went on about how I'd felt free to take liberties with the scenes I encountered and how the whole show couldn't stand up as true documentary.

Moral of the story? When asked, pull an Evans and lie your ass off. There'll always be some idiot who misses the forest for the leaf you plucked off one tree.

[Michael Graves]

Guess we need to add Ansel to the Black List. He freely admitted to removing litter from scenes before photographing them (and you thought that was a modern problem!), and in one of his articles mentioned trimming back the branches of a tree to remove an obstruction.

[John Jarosz]

Having shown some of these articles to journalist friends who are not photographers, their main response is along the lines of "much ado about nothing".

John

[eschatologized]

Incidentally, I'm not sure rearranging props makes an image less "straight." Does it? I think it just makes it less valid as a document.

You're right; I should have considered my word choice more carefully. I don't consider Evans a "straight" photographer in the Group f/64 sense, but even if he had rearranged items it would not have been inconsistent with that aesthetic.

I also agree about the continuity of his FSA work with his earlier work. This is made quite clear in "The Hungry Eye," which is an excellent book (and very affordable in the reduced-format edition).

Ansel Adams describes spotting out the "LP" mark cut into a hill in one of his images in the "Examples" book. But I don't think he was (or ever claimed to be) a chronicler of "objective" reality in nature. He wouldn't have used such extensive dodging and burning, for one, if that was his goal. In "The Print" he emphasizes his interest in expressive prints faithful to his visualizations of the images, not necessarily to the "reality" in the scenes.

[Annie M.]

Finally!

Incontrovertible evidence why Walker Evans did not subscribe to a linear conception of time!!

Evans' images of the Fortune model of the Westclox prove it... the times recorded in the images sequence as related by Evans was in fact true... it was time that was lying not Evans. He obviously put the clock in the scene to demonstrate how time was particularly nonlinear that day.

[Doug Howk]

Had hoped for denouement; but, with the last article, the controversies still remain. "pure" documentary photography is a myth, according to Morris and others, even possibly with Evans. The clock still seems unlikely for the Burroughs home. How do you maintain the correct time when there is no readily available means of correcting it?

[Michael Alpert]

Which goes to prove what? . . .

Kirk, it proves at least two things. (1) James Curtis can build a whole career based on a ridiculously unsophisticated interpretation of photography and what photographers do, and (2) Errol Morris can have a lazy interview published in the New York Times. Morris presents almost nothing that is worthwhile in the "series." (It's not a series; it's just an interview broken up into sections.) The fact that Morris owns a bulldog is probably his most noteworthy attribute. Nothing that either Curtis or Morris have to say about Evans (and others) is worthy of thought. American cultural criticism, including criticism found in the NYT, sometimes scrapes the bottom of the cognitive barrel. Sadly, the long shadows of great photographers like Evans seem to be afflicted with parasites.

[r.e.]

Last Sunday's New York Times Book Review had a review of a new biography of Dorthea Lange:http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/bo...ky-t.html?_r=1

The review talks about the iconic photograph Migrant Mother and how it was made. Whatever the merits of Migrant Mother as an image, I think that it's just plain wrong to pass off what these people were doing as documentary photography.

As for the merits of the images, it seems to me that the esteem in which they are held is intimately bound up with the belief that they are street/documentary photographs. When it turns out that they aren't - that a photograph like Migrant Mother was posed under Lange's direction - one has got to wonder whether any decent Hollywood director could have done as well if not better. Indeed, there are film directors, such as Pasolini, who worked with lay actors - indeed barely literate street kids - and got incredible images from them; but Pasolini certainly didn't try to pass off his work as anything other than what it was - cinematic fiction.

I think that trying to defend what the FSA photographers were doing would be like trying to defend Cartier-Bresson or Robert Frank if it came out that their photographs were staged. Their reputations would be ruined, and rightfully so.

[Dan Fromm]

Hmm. So the image counts for nothing, the story behind it is everything?