Walker Evans: Signs - SIGNED by Andre Codrescu

Walker; Codrescu, Andrei; J. Paul Getty Museum; Condrescu, Andrei Evans

ISBN 10: 0500542244 / ISBN 13: 9780500542248

Published by Getty Museum; Los Angeles, 1998

About this Item

SIGNED First Edition Hardcover-black cloth- in NEAR FINE Condition in FINE Dustjacket. SIGNED by Andre Codrescu on second front endpaper. NOT personalized or inscribed. A selection of fifty photographs by Evans from the Getty's collection, accompanied by an essay and commentary by Codrescu. Includes 8 page fold-out pamphlet "Walker Evans New York" & Getty Museum bookmark. Carefully shipped.

Seller Inventory # 510258

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Walker Evans: Signs - SIGNED by Andre Codrescu
• Publisher: Getty Museum; Los Angeles
• Publication Date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0500542244
• ISBN 13: 9780500542248
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Fine
• Signed: Signed by Author(s)
• Seller catalogs:
  • Photography

About this title

Synopsis

Hardback book with dust jacket titled WALKER EVANS:Signs (LL-2A)

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.