Sanders McNew
Rolleiflex User
Agreed -- have read both. How does his new book compare?
Brooktaw
Established
The new book is principally a collection of articles that he has produced over the last 20 years so it is fragmented and quite different from the sustained exposition of the other 2 books. However it means that you can dip in and out of individual pieces and I've enjoyed his original views on people who I thought I knew well such as Herzog and Friedlander alongside photographers I've never heard of such as Struth and Bing.
There is usually only one illustration in each piece which is a little frustrating and means having an internet browser to hand but it is certainly worth reading to have established orthodoxies challenged and provocative ideas suggested.
A question that has been occupying my thoughts today is.
"Did (Walker) Evans take pictures of things - sagging shacks, abandoned cars, vernacular signage - whose attractions had been obvious for years before he photographed them? Or did the act of photographing this stuff imbue it with an aesthetic dimension to which we had hitherto been somehow oblivious?"
"Documentation doubled as creation."
agentlossing
Well-known
Good question, because Walker Evans still has a lot of things to observe and ponder over in his work! He definitely romanticized objects, like household implements, shacks, houses, etc. etc. and they often serve kind of in place of human subjects, yet his work is always about people. It's always portraiture, even when it's just a row of houses with nary a human in sight. There's a lot to think about when looking at photos like that trying to feel out what exactly Evans meant by them, but, like good music or poetry, his images seem to have been designed to elicit a subjective reaction. We feel what we want to feel. It's filtered through our experiences rather than being stage-managed. Even his sharecropper pictures show several sides to the people, you could see the dignity of poverty, or the sadness of poverty, or half a dozen other things being featured, even when nothing seems to be being overtly featured.