Walker Evans - Hardcover

Mellow, James R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 046509077X ISBN 13: 9780465090778

Publisher: Basic Books, 1999

Synopsis

Walker Evans (1903–1975) is best known as one of the leading documentary photographers of the Depression Era, and for his photographs of Alabama sharecroppers in James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His FSA photographs have become icons in the American consciousness, and are perhaps the most influential body of photographic work in this century.But Evans was not the propagandist for social causes he was presumed to be; he was, instead, a fastidious observer, recording, simply, the way things were. His instinctive aversion to “artiness” contrasted him sharply from his senior Alfred Stieglitz, and his immediate contemporary, Ansel Adams. Evans' eye took him toward the dusty particulars, the backroads of American life, its rundown mill towns, roadside stands, torn movie posters and advertisements for departed minstrel shows. He developed a peculiarly American vernacular, his particular trademark that makes an Evans photograph almost instantly recognizable.With unrestricted access to all of Evans' diaries, letters, work logs and contact sheets, James R. Mellow has produced one of the most finely wrought portraits of a major American artist ever. Also, it is a deeply informed cultural history of the 1930s and '40s and a lively account of friendships and influences with the likes of Lincoln Kirstein and James Agee.

About this title

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.

Reviews

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.

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.

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 Francisco
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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

Edition details

• Publisher: Basic Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 046509077X
• ISBN 13: 9780465090778
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 656