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

[Scott Whitford]

Hmm...I rather liked Agee's prose in the book. Intrigued, I went on to read A Death in the Family and thought it to be quite a powerfully written short novel. Very Faulkner-esque.

As for criticizing Evans for moving a stupid clock....sorry Mr Morris - the man's untouchable in my esteem. If he moved the damned clock, it needed moving.

Scott

[paulr]

As for criticizing Evans for moving a stupid clock....sorry Mr Morris - the man's untouchable in my esteem. If he moved the damned clock, it needed moving.

No one's questioning Evans' greatness as an artist.

This is an investigation into something else entirely (maybe read the article?)

[Daniel_Buck]

(maybe read the article?)

I read some of it, but it got pretty darn boring, and long, couldn't finish it.

[paulr]

I read some of it, but it got pretty darn boring, and long, couldn't finish it.

Fair enough, but you can't argue intelligently with Morris if you haven't read his side.

[r.e.]

Mr. Curtis wrote a book almost 20 years ago in which he made an argument, now resurected in the NYT piece, that the people who worked for the Farm Security Administration had an ideological bent that is reflected in their work. This is not exactly an earth-shattering thesis; to me, it is only a wonder that he spent so much time with minutiae trying to prove it, but I guess that that is what some historians do.

The current Wikipedia article on the Farm Security Administration says:

Together with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (not a government project) and documentary prose (e.g. Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), the FSA photography project is most responsible for creating the image of the Depression in the USA. Many of the images appeared in popular magazines. The photographers were under instruction from Washington as to what overall impression the New Deal wanted to give out. Stryker's [the head of the Administration's Information Section] agenda focused on his faith in social engineering, the poor conditions among cotton tenant farmers, and the very poor conditions among migrant farm workers; above all he was committed to social reform through New Deal intervention in people's lives. Stryker demanded photographs that "related people to the land and vice versa" because these photographs reinforced the RA's position that poverty could be controlled by "changing land practices." Though Stryker did not dictate to his photographers how they should compose the shots, he did send them lists of desirable themes, e.g., "church," "court day," "barns." Stryker sought photographs of migratory workers that would tell a story about how they lived day-to-day. He asked Dorothea Lange to emphasize cooking, sleeping, praying and socializing.

Is there any serious question about what people like Agee and Evans and Lange and Parks and Shahn were doing? I read Agee when I was 18, and even then I knew better than to take what he said as gospel.

They had an aesthetic and a message, and they were good at what they did. So was Leni Riefenstahl.

What this means for the status of the work done under the auspices of the FSA as "art" is an interesting, and legitimate, question.

[mandoman7]

Fair enough, but you can't argue intelligently with Morris if you haven't read his side.

I would question the intelligence of entering the argument in the first place.
This is time better spent on the subject of where we are deluding ourselves in our work, though it is fun as it is to humanize the big figures.

[Michael Jones]

No one's questioning Evans' greatness as an artist.

This is an investigation into something else entirely (maybe read the article?)

I agree with Paul. The article is at least interesting, and until I read the final installment, I'm not sure where it will lead (but I agree, some of the comments are irritating to me as a photographer and because the subjects cannot defend themselves).

Mike

[claudiocambon]

I read the article as a fascinating dissection of what we can assemble about an artist's process when we use only the finished results as evidence. Morris is really good at this. His analysis of the Fenton 'Valley of Death' photographs was amazing for being so meticulous (yes, to the point of apparently boring you, but I think it's worth toughing it out).

I'm with Paul on this; this is not an attack on Evans. Morris would probably be the first person to say, "Never let the facts get in the way of the truth." However, people still have issues, individually and as a group, understanding what photographs really represent, namely that they are more assertions of beliefs about what we think is true, rather than factual proof of an objective truth. Documentary photography is a great crucible for talking about this, but again, no one is saying the pictures aren't good.

There is a great Lewis Hine quote on this matter: "Photographs do not lie, but liars may photograph."

[aduncanson]

I thought it funny that in Part 4, published today, Morris quotes Curtis as ascribing confusion to a cow in one of Rothstein's photos. Mr. Curtis must have had little close up experience with living cows.

[eschatologized]

Is there any serious question about what people like Agee and Evans and Lange and Parks and Shahn were doing? . . . They had an aesthetic and a message, and they were good at what they did.

I would hesitate before lumping Evans in with the other FSA photographers. According to "The Hungry Eye," Evans was interested in the project purely as an aesthetic endeavor. He clearly was not interested in politics as such, and to the extent people read his FSA photographs as "political," my sense is that those readings are assigning an ideology to what is actually an aesthetic.

See http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap04.html: "Stryker admired Evans's photographs, but the two men did not always get along well. In part this reflected differences in personality, but it also reflected the conflict between Evans's ideal of creating a pure record and Stryker's concern with producing photographs useful to the agency and promoting political or social change."

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."