Walker Evans, big and small

Review

Vast show captures his eye for detail

December 18, 2011|By Mark Feeney, Globe Staff

THE EXACTING EYE OF WALKER EVANS

At: Florence Griswold Museum, 96 Lyme St., Old Lyme, Conn., through Jan. 29, 860-434-5542, www.flogris.org

OLD LYME, Conn. - Two aspects of “The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans’’ immediately recommend it. The show runs through Jan. 29 at the Florence Griswold Museum, in Old Lyme, Conn.

First off, it’s Evans. That should be more than enough. Is the work of any other photographer so deeply, or so deservedly, lodged in American memory? Evans’s images of sharecroppers and subway riders and 19th-century architecture - at once visually austere and profoundly humane - have become as basic to this culture as the first sentence of “Moby-Dick’’ or the last one of “Gatsby.’’ Boats against the current? Evans made images against the current. He wanted, he said, to “photograph the present as it will appear as the past.’’

In his New York Times review of Evans’s landmark 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Hilton Kramer voiced a commonly held opinion. He wondered if “our imagination of what the United States looked like and felt like in the nineteen-thirties [has] been determined not by a novel or a play or a poem or a painting or even by our own memories, but by’’ Evans’s photographs.

Second, the show presents Evans whole, or as whole as can be accounted for by more than 200 photographs, two display cases of vintage magazines (courtesy of Boston collector Rodger Kingston), and a brace of old signs collected by Evans. The only obvious omission is his magnificent 1929 series of images of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Otherwise, “The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans’’ follows its subject through the ’30s (Cuba, visits to the American South, work for the Farm Security Administration, collaboration with James Agee on “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,’’ the subway portraits) through his years at Fortune magazine in the ’40s and ’50s, and on to the almost-gleeful liberation evident in the color Polaroids Evans took during the final year and a half of his life. The show has 80 of them.

Such wholeness is unusual with treatments of Evans (1903-75). Kramer’s praise is representative in the way it’s limiting as well as lavish. So often Evans’s achievement gets cropped. That is, the photographs from the ’30s are focused on at the expense of everything else. As “The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans’’ bears out, not only was there a lot of everything else. It was a very good everything else.