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Focus on Reality
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20376 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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3 / 1992 |
1,407 Words |
| Author
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Eric Gibson
Eric Gibson, art critic for the Washington Times, last wrote
on Henry Ossewa Tanner in the September 1991 issue of The
World & I. |
The Walker Evans photographs currently on view at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., look backward and forward at the same time. Taken just before World War II, they recall earlier work done in Europe, and at the same time they anticipate--and help usher in the documentary photography of our own time by Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus.
Walker Evans: Subway Photographs and Other Recent Acquisitions (on view through march 1) is a small show of only about fifty images, primarily candid shots Evans took of New Yorkers riding their subway between 1938 and 1941.
Evans was a member of the generation of photographers who ushered in the shift from fine art photography to one that dealt more directly with the realities of daily existence. He helped let the fresh air into photography. He made a deliberate effort to ground it in what he saw as a deeper truth by addressing himself to life as it was lived in the cities. Anyone who likes photography but bridles at its occasional self absorption and contrived preciousness--innumerable quasi-abstract still lives or landscapes that seem to lack only a chorus of angels will relish the unpretentiousness of Evan's in the moment realism.
In part, he was a beneficiary of technology. The development of the 35 mm camera, and faster lenses and film speeds did for photography in a sense what the nineteenth-century invention of paint in tubes did for painting liberated artists to go out in the world and with a greater freedom and ease than ever before accorded them, record the world as they saw it and as it manifested itself to them. Cumbersome equipment and the role of the studio were all, to some extent made a thing of the past. At the very least, their status became optional.
Another factor, of course, was the Depression. Like Dorothea Lange and other photographers, Evans had been selected by the government to work for the Farm Security Administration, photographing the rural poor in order to dramatize the need for federal assistance for them. In 1941, Evan's work would appear in a book jointly authored by James Agee entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. After glimpsing the lowest levels of society, photographers had to redefine the notion of "high art."
Finally, there was art itself. The city had been, for two decades at least, an important subject for American artists and photographers. John Marin and Joseph Stella had painted New York mesmerized by its skyscrapers and bridges and
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