Walker Evans
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Walker Evans Details
Amazon.com Review Before his death in 1997, James Mellow left one last gracefully written, sensitively nuanced biography to add to a shelf containing National Book Award winner Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times and a remarkable trilogy on seminal figures of the Lost Generation. Mellow's biography of photographer Walker Evans (1903-1977) is just as nimble in making connections between an individual life and the cultural trends it reflected and affected. Although he will always be best remembered for the austere images of Depression-era poverty that accompanied James Agee's prose in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Evans was a nondidactic social realist. "I love to find American vernacular," he once remarked, and Mellow's subtle analysis of Evans's work shows his fastidiously uninflected photographic style being mistaken for a "documentary." In fact, the images' psychological intensity and formal sophistication make the photographs far more than simple records of a time or place. Mellow does not neglect Evans's turbulent personal life, including two divorces and a drinking problem, and is astute about the role in his success of collaborators like Agee, "more ambitious, more hard-headed, more informed about opportunities and better placed to make use of them." Each page and elegantly turned sentence proclaims Mellow's mastery of the biographical craft; he will be sorely missed. --Wendy Smith Read more From Publishers Weekly When NBA-winning biographer James R. Mellow (Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company) died in 1997, he left behind an unfinished manuscript on the life of American photographer Walker Evans. That manuscript makes up the bulk of this book, and chronicles, in abundant detail, the first 53 years of Evanss life: 16 pages of Mellows notes conclude the volume by outlining Evanss activities from 1955 to 1977. This dense, well-documented study should satisfy anyone seeking a comprehensive account of Evanss early life, influence and photographic achievement, crowned by Evanss one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 (the first photographer to be so honored) and by his collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Mellow traces Evanss modern style with an expert eye, finding its source in the French photographer Eugene Atget, and its birth in 1926, the year Evans (who had wanted to be a writer) spent in Paris. Mellow glosses over a key incident in Evanss early years: when Evans was 15, his father, a Midwestern advertising executive, moved in with the familys next-door neighbor, neither divorcing Evanss mother nor marrying the neighbor. This duplicitous arrangement surely helped produce an adolescent who grew up to value candor in his photography. Mellows analyses of the photographs he reproduces, however, and Hilton Kramers excellent introduction, help explain why his work seemed so modern, and what kinds of pleasure it can give us now. Evans the man seems to have been an Anglophilic snob and a coward. His final two decadeswhich he spent as a professor at Yalehave already been chronicled in Jerry Thompsons poignant The Last Years of Walker Evans; as those years didnt produce Evanss best work, their absence from Mellows manuscript hardly reduces his achievement. 150 b&w photos. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal The late National Book Award winner Mellow (1926-97) had unrestricted access to Evans's diaries, work logs, contact sheets, taped interviews, and letters. He weaves these together with information gleaned from secondary sources to create a study of the man and his work habits, weaknesses and strengths, influences, and relationships. This is then a thorough study of Walker Evans's life, complementing rather than competing with the photohistorical assessment of his career found in Belinda Rathbone's Walker Evans: A Biography (LJ 6/1/95). The book is illustrated with photos not published elsewhere, but the images are not the book's strength. One of Mellow's surprising conclusions is that Evans was not a propagandist for social causes but simply an unflinchingly clear-eyed observer. Evans expressed his distaste for all that was artificial in photography; it is the complexity of his seemingly unemotional and factual images that remains today. Highly recommended for biography, American studies, and photohistory collections.AKathleen Collins, Bank of America Corporate Archives, San FranciscoCopyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Booklist Mellow won the National Book Award for his life of Nathaniel Hawthorne, wrote a trilogy on the Lost Generation, and, sadly, did not live to see this elegant volume in print. By combing every available archive for multiple perspectives on Evans' complex relationships with women and intense collaborative friendships with men, Mellow has addressed his subject's slippery personality head-on. Hart Crane was an inspiration, as was Lincoln Kirstein, who first sent Evans out on the road, thus cuing him to the "American vernacular" at the heart of his radical and endlessly influential style. Kirstein was also instrumental in Evans becoming the first photographer to have a one-man retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. And then there was James Agee, Evans' partner in the creation of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). As Mellow writes, "there is always more than meets the casual eye" in Evans' pioneering photographs, and Mellow's canny interpretation of Evans' life, aesthetics, and techniques help readers see far beyond mere patterns of black and white. Donna Seaman Read more From Kirkus Reviews A superb biography of a photographer who, dead for a quarter of a century, still exerts a powerful influence. The late literary biographer Mellow (Hemingway: A Life without Consequences, 1992, etc.), who died in 1997, views Walker Evans (19031975) primarily as a politically committed storyteller and documentarian; in this regard he echoes the critic Carl Van Vechten, who wrote of a 1938 collection of Evanss images of the Depression era, if everything in American civilization were destroyed except Walker Evanss photographs, they could tell us a good deal about American life. Unlike some critics, however, Mellow does not take this to mean that Evans was primarily a left-wing propagandist, even if his most famous work, the photographs accompanying James Agees text Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, were summary indictments of American capitalism. (Evanss friends, Mellow writes, were puzzled when in 1945 Evans accepted a position at the high-capitalist Fortune magazine, whose publisher Henry Luce had become convinced that it is easier to turn poets into business journalists than to turn bookkeepers into writers and who gave Evans a free hand during the photographers 21 years on the magazines staff.) The portrait that Mellow offers is one of Evans as an extraordinarily talented and hard-working artist but also as something of a wastrel, one who greeted his biographer at their first meeting in 1974 with the offer of an early-morning glass of brandy and who logged time getting soused with Ernest Hemingway in Cuba and Edmund Wilson in Manhattan. Despite his penchant for the bottle, though, as Mellow ably documents, Evans inspired and taught many young photographers, perhaps the most notable of them the Swiss migr Robert Frank; he also crafted a rich body of work that is well represented in the 150 images placed throughout Mellows text. Well written, lively, and thoroughly documented, Mellows biography is a fine contribution to American art and cultural history. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Read more Review How refreshing to read a commentator on art who evokes both what something looks like and, without malarkey, what it signifies. -- The New York Times Book Review, Nicholas Fox Weber Read more About the Author James R. Mellow's 1983 biography, Nathaniel Hawthorne in His Times, won the National Book Award. He is also the author of a trilogy of biographies of the Lost Generation: Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company; Invented Lives: F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; and Hemingway: A Life Without Consequences. He has written extensively for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Architectural Digest, and Gourmet and Arts magazines. James Mellow died in 1998. Read more
Reviews
This is one of the best written books on the wonderful Walker Evans. It is well worth any price to own a copy of this book to remember one of the greatest American photographers ever!