15 May – 12 July 2003
8 Great Newport Street
‘Nobody
should touch a Polaroid [camera] until he’s over sixty’
This show
will bring more than seventy polaroid pictures by Walker Evans to the
UK for the first time. They will be seen alongside sixty of his earlier
work, revealing a new insight to his approach, technique and his fascination
with the vernacular of American life.
Walker Evans
became best known for his early work during the Great Depression of the
1930s. It was at this time that the U.S. government became aware of the
potential power of documentary black and white photography in the fight
against poverty. Several photographers, including Evans and Dorothea Lange,
were sent to photograph sharecroppers and their lives in the rural deep
south, under the aegis of President Roosevelt’s New Deal Resettlement
Administration (which later became the Farm Security Administration).
In 1936 Evans spent several weeks in Hale County, Alabama, with the writer
James Agee. The book of their work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was
published in 1941 and is now heralded as an American classic.
Evans was
greatly influenced by the French photographer Eugène Atget, who
restlessly and obsessively recorded the people, buildings, shops and homes
of Paris in the early twentieth century. While Evans’ subjects were
less localised, he revisited several similar broad themes throughout his
career: storefront displays and shop windows; handmade and machine-made
commercial signs; religious and domestic architecture; interior and exterior
shots and portraits of passers-by and friends. This show will examine
how he revisits these tropes throughout his career.
Much less
is known about Evans’ work after 1940, although he continued to
take photographs until the final year of his life. Four months shy of
his seventieth birthday, and recovering from an illness, Evans bought
an SX-70 camera and was supplied with film by Polaroid. Even in his twilight
years he was never afraid to experiment. Despite denouncing colour film
as ‘vulgar’, Evans had dabbled in it throughout his career,
as can be seen in his work for Fortune magazine. At first he saw the SX-70
camera ‘as a toy’, but it was to prove a rejuvenating one.
From 1973 to late 1974 he took over 2,500 small, instant colour snapshots
to produce the ‘strange and wonderful fruit of a late, unexpected
harvest’ In these polaroids we see him revisit the familiar tropes
of previous work in a new and fresh way.
Thanks to
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, Howard Greenberg, New York and Galerie
Baudoin Lebon, Paris |
