Walker Evans: Signs (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum) - Hardcover

Andrei Codrescu

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892363762 ISBN 13: 9780892363766

Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998

Synopsis

Walker Evans photographed signs throughout every phase of his career. From the 1920s to the time of his death in 1975, Evans was obsessed with the signage he found in modern America--from billboards to gas station pumps to street graffiti to handmade announcements of a Saturday-night dance. This book features fifth photographs of signs from the Getty Museum's collection, presented with a lively, provocative essay by Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu trains a perceptive eye on the artistic and social climate in Evans's America and reflects on the photographer's images as documents and commentary. Some of the images included come from the place and era most closely associated with Evans--the rural South of the 1930s. But also included are photographs that will be less familiar to many of his admirers, such as his images of New York City street scenes and advertising signs, or pictures he took in Havana and in Sarasota, Florida.

About this title

Review

For many people, Walker Evans's name conjures up visions of the rural American South of the 1930s, where the photographer made some of his most notable images. But signs--marking buildings; advertising grocery prices, churches, and cabarets; communicating political messages--transfixed him throughout his life. Evans was interested in all aspects of signs, from the typography and graphic layout to the messages they conveyed and the objects themselves. He collected nearly as many of them as he photographed and often exhibited actual signs alongside his photos. Andrei Codrescu, in the essay he wrote to accompany the images in Signs, offers a concise explanation of the power of this subject matter. He writes that Evans's era was, "the time of popular writing, of huge advertisements, of lettering that invaded every nook and cranny and even wrote the skyline. America wrote big, with bold new alphabets, in lightbulbs, in neon, in smoke. One could follow the text of twentieth-century America from coast to coast...."

This small book is beautifully designed. The 50 gelatin silver prints selected from the Getty Museum's collection are reproduced on full pages with little or no cropping, and are meticulously documented at the back of the book with notations on dimensions, dates the photos were shot, and printing dates. A wide range of images, from the Photographer's Window Display, in which miniature portraits are displayed behind a pane of glass on which the word studio is painted, to a pair of commercially produced movie posters advertising a double feature of The Man from Guntown and I Hate Women, offers readers perspective on the breadth of Evans's vision. This focused look at an element of Evans's photography helps broaden the understanding of his entire body of work.

About the Author

Andrei Codrescu is a poet, novelist, and filmmaker, whose commentaries are often heard on National Public Radio. His latest publication is Hail, Babylon: In Search of the American City at the End of the Millennium.

Edition details

• Publisher: J. Paul Getty Museum
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0892363762
• ISBN 13: 9780892363766
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96