Walker Evans

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?

". . . confronting a world not of our making that is nonetheless ours. " Peter Galassi , "Walker Evans & Company"

". . . confronting a world not of our making that is nonetheless ours. " Peter Galassi , "Walker Evans & Company"

Missing modernity I own a gift store on Mass. Ave. and have walked by "Threepeat" many times in the last few years. I was extremely disappointed in the building from the moment I saw it begin to take shape - count me in with those who consider it a pompous, oversized, bland, wasted opportunity ("Tradition embodied at Harvard," Arts & Movies, Dec. 11). I think current buildings should actually be modern and reflect our time, not poorly imitate the past. Columbia University just added a new building by José Rafael Moneo, and across the street, Barnard College recently opened a new student center designed by...

Missing modernity I own a gift store on Mass. Ave. and have walked by "Threepeat" many times in the last few years. I was extremely disappointed in the building from the moment I saw it begin to take shape - count me in with those who consider it a pompous, oversized, bland, wasted opportunity ("Tradition embodied at Harvard," Arts & Movies, Dec. 11). I think current buildings should actually be modern and reflect our time, not poorly imitate the past. Columbia University just added a new building by José Rafael Moneo, and across the street, Barnard College recently opened a new student center designed by...

NEW YORK — The automobile almost ranks with the camera as a necessary piece of photographic equipment. Lens-bearing road trippers have included Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, Stephen Shore, and, first among many other equals, Robert Frank. Almost always the car has served simply as vehicular means to artistic end. Lee Friedlander, another photographer who’s racked up a lot of mileage over the years, puts the automobile to additional artistic use in “Lee Friedlander: America by Car.’’ It becomes venue as well as vehicle.

With all due respect to our Olympians, the real Team USA's achievements can't be seen this week on NBC and its various cable networks live and on tape from Beijing. Instead, you have to go online, to lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html. That's where you can find the more than 160,000 images taken by a small band of photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information between 1935 and 1943. They're the real Team USA - Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, to name just the most famous.

William Christenberry locates his photographs at the intersection of simplicity and profundity. His enduring concerns are the interplay between the eternal and ephemeral; the passage of time generally; and how that interplay and passage figure in the rural Alabama where he grew up and which he's photographed for nearly half a century. Christenberry is one of the great visual chroniclers of the South, very much an heir of Walker Evans and counterpart of his friend and fellow colorist William Eggleston.

CONCORD — Part of what makes a painting a painting, regardless of whether it’s abstract or representational, is that when we see it we know it doesn’t present a slice of objective reality. Part of what makes a photograph a photograph, regardless of whether Walker Evans took it or a 6-year-old with a cellphone, is that we do assume it presents a slice of objective reality. “Seeing Is Believing,’’ which runs at the Concord Art Association through Aug. 12, wonders what happens when we don’t necessarily recognize a photograph as a photograph or when a...

“I talk with the authority of failure.’’ When thinking about the popular culture of the 1930s, that icon of Jazz Age decadence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, rarely comes to mind. And yet it is Fitzgerald’s words that haunt Morris Dickstein’s judiciously researched, persuasively argued, elegant analysis of Depression culture, “Dancing in the Dark.’’ Failure was in the air - the country itself had failed, in a way - and the weightless fantasies of a prior decade had lost their savor.

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?

NEW YORK — The automobile almost ranks with the camera as a necessary piece of photographic equipment. Lens-bearing road trippers have included Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Berenice Abbott, Stephen Shore, and, first among many other equals, Robert Frank. Almost always the car has served simply as vehicular means to artistic end. Lee Friedlander, another photographer who’s racked up a lot of mileage over the years, puts the automobile to additional artistic use in “Lee Friedlander: America by Car.’’ It becomes venue as well as vehicle.

CONCORD — Part of what makes a painting a painting, regardless of whether it’s abstract or representational, is that when we see it we know it doesn’t present a slice of objective reality. Part of what makes a photograph a photograph, regardless of whether Walker Evans took it or a 6-year-old with a cellphone, is that we do assume it presents a slice of objective reality. “Seeing Is Believing,’’ which runs at the Concord Art Association through Aug. 12, wonders what happens when we don’t necessarily recognize a photograph as a photograph or when a...

William Christenberry locates his photographs at the intersection of simplicity and profundity. His enduring concerns are the interplay between the eternal and ephemeral; the passage of time generally; and how that interplay and passage figure in the rural Alabama where he grew up and which he's photographed for nearly half a century. Christenberry is one of the great visual chroniclers of the South, very much an heir of Walker Evans and counterpart of his friend and fellow colorist William Eggleston.

With all due respect to our Olympians, the real Team USA's achievements can't be seen this week on NBC and its various cable networks live and on tape from Beijing. Instead, you have to go online, to lcweb2.loc.gov/ammem/fsowhome.html. That's where you can find the more than 160,000 images taken by a small band of photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information between 1935 and 1943. They're the real Team USA - Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, to name just the most famous.

ART AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE AMERICAN SCENE, 1929-1945 Exploring the role of African-Americans in the visual and performing arts during the Great Depression and World War II, the show includes work by Thomas Hart Benton, Walker Evans, Samuel Brown, and Jacob Lawrence, among many others. Through April 22. Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown. 413-597-2429, wcma.williams.edu SHAPESHIFTING: TRANSFORMATIONS IN NATIVE AMERICAN ART A survey of Native American art, from historical objects to ambitious contemporary works.

I must have mentioned to Lucian Freud one day that I had never eaten grouse, because he arranged a dinner at his house in Notting Hill one night for me and his granddaughter Frances Costelloe. I was 29, Frances was about 15. Lucian, who had recently finished a small portrait of the queen (so small that he used to pull the unfinished portrait out of a Camper shoe box to show me), had some grouse sent down from Chatsworth by his friend the Duchess of Devonshire. He and David Dawson, his assistant, roasted the birds, and we all ate them, taking care to avoid the little pieces of shot.