Walker Evans and Documentary photography

 Walker Evans is a prominent figure in early documentary photography. He produced worked for the farm security administration during the great depression (1930’s) in America. Despite the FSA having an agenda (Oberlin, 2001), he often stuck to his own agenda of photographing every day American life. In his own writing, he aimed for photographs which acted as “pure record not propaganda” (Library of Congress, 1988)

 His work appeared in many magazines and books, and his images are often remembered as being almost iconic of the great depression (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000).  Despite being a labelled an early documentary photographer, he didn’t agree with having his work labelled as documentary photographs.

Street Scene, Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1936. Walker Evans

 In conversation with Leslie Katz in 1971, Walker Evans was asked whether “photographs can be documentary as well as works of art.” He replied;

 “Documentary? That’s a very sophisticated and misleading word. And not really clear. You have to have a sophisticated ear to receive that word. The term should be documentary style. An example of a literal document would be a police photograph of a murder scene. You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, though it certainly can adopt that style.” – Walker Evans, 1971

(American Suburb X, 2011)

 This is a quote that has stuck with me heavily since I first read it. Whereas previously I used to say I enjoyed documentary photography (knowing that it was a broad term), I didn’t know how to formally distinguish photographs in that genre from one another. A Lewis Hine photograph of a child worker was regarded as a piece of documentary photography as much as a stylised Alec Soth portrait, but they actually have vast differences and sit in different places in documentary photography (if that label is still valid at all for the work concerned). A photograph is always a document of something, so I must avoid using it now. Perhaps over the course of this blog, I shall discover that I shouldn’t use it at all, or that documentary photography is actually something very specific, and not what I originally though it signified.

References

1.       Oberlin, Gorman,J (2001) The History of the Farm Security Administration. Available at: http://www.oberlin.edu/library/papers/honorshistory/2001-Gorman/FSA/FSAhistory/fsahist1.html (Accessed January 2013).

2.     Library of Congress (1988), Documenting America: Walker Evans, New York City Block. Available at: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap04.html (accessed February 2013).

3.       Metropolitan Museum Of Art (2000), Walker Evans (1903-1975). Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm (accessed February 2013).

4.       American Suburb X (2011) An Interview with Walker Evans (1971).Available at: http://www.americansuburbx.com/2011/10/interview-an-interview-with-walker-evans-pt-1-1971.html (accessed January 2013).

Pictures

• Walker Evans, (1936), Street Scene, Vicksburg, Mississippi [ONLINE]. Available at: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/1999.237.1 [Accessed 02 April 13].