The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Walker Evans · a sequence of photographs in two parts, made in 1938 · published that year as a book by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, with an essay by Lincoln Kirstein after the plates, and shown there the same autumn as an exhibition of the same name · gelatin silver prints, made largely with a large-format view camera · the unit scored is the book and exhibition sequence of 1938 as one work: the book its enduring form and the bearer of most of its weight, the exhibition scored as made and as recorded, its loss as a hang weighed on The Imperishable alone
Mode
Documentary photography claimed as art; a sequenced book whose meaning lies in juxtaposition
Mythos
America as a nation to be read from its surfaces: Main Street, the roadside, the mill, the church, the grave; its people passing into their own architecture
Phase
Photographs made in the years before 1938, many of them for the federal Resettlement Administration; sequenced, published and exhibited in 1938
Presentation
A book in two parts, one plate to a spread on the right-hand page with the facing page blank, an essay by Lincoln Kirstein after the plates; an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in the same year, hung in an order of its own
Register
Cool, flat and frontal: attention without pity, appeal or drama, rising in places to a quiet gravity
Scale
A country in its vernacular, North and South, city and town; a book of plates held in two hands
Governing Proposition
In 1938 Walker Evans gathered his photographs of the American vernacular, its signs, shopfronts, posters, cars, churches and frame houses and the people who lived among them, into a book of two parts, published by the Museum of Modern Art with an exhibition of the same name. Each plate stands alone on its page, the facing page blank, and the order does the arguing: the first part holds people among their images, the second the built country without them. The wager of the work is that a plain, frontal record, made without comment and in part for a government file, could be the medium’s own art, and that a nation could be read from its surfaces as faithfully as from its monuments.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Walker Evans (1903 to 1975) made American Photographs in 1938. It was published that year as a book by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and shown there in the autumn as an exhibition of the same name. The book carries one essay, by Lincoln Kirstein, printed after the plates. The photographs were made in the years before, in New York, in the South and in Pennsylvania; the plates named on this page are dated from 1929 to 1936, and many in the book were made for the federal Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration. They are gelatin silver prints, made largely with a large-format view camera.
The work scored is the sequence of 1938 as one work, in the two forms it took that year. The book is the enduring form and carries most of the weight. The exhibition is scored as made and as recorded: it hung its prints in an order that was not the book’s, its sequence on the walls is not known in detail, and it does not survive as a hang. That loss is weighed on The Imperishable alone. The government files from which many plates were drawn, the later reissues and the prints in collections are context and evidence, and are not the unit.
The book is in two parts. The first holds people and the signs, posters, shopfronts and cars they live among; the second holds buildings, from Greek Revival houses and wooden churches to frame houses and Victorian villas. Each plate is printed alone on a right-hand page, with the facing page left blank. Among the plates are License Photo Studio, New York, 1934; Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936; Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, 1936; Roadside Stand near Birmingham, 1936; Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania, 1936; Minstrel Showbill, 1936; Sons of the American Legion, 1936; Girl in Fulton Street, New York, 1929; Houses and Billboards in Atlanta, 1936; and a graveyard at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, of 1935, with a steel mill behind it.
Movement II
The book knows that it is made of pictures in a country made of pictures. License Photo Studio is a shop that sells photographs of people; Penny Picture Display, at Savannah, is a wall of small identical portraits, the democratic image at a cent each, and the method of the book seen in one plate: faces set side by side and left to speak by their likeness and their difference. The movie posters, the minstrel bill and the billboards of Atlanta carry the same disclosure. America in the 1930s is a country saturated with images of itself, and the book places its own photographs among them.
That is one of three things the book brings into the open, and they can be stated. A civilisation can be read in its vernacular as faithfully as in its monuments, and the plain made world of ordinary Americans is a record of who they are. The people of the Depression are citizens, not cases. These are disclosures of a social condition, not a mood, and they hold. What keeps The Unconcealment at 8.7 is that the book declines to state, and some of what it gives is a tone, a cool attention, rather than a claim.
The style is a departure from three inheritances at once: the expressive print of Stieglitz and his circle, the plea for reform of Riis and Hine, and the illustrated magazine that subordinated the picture to caption and story. The maker keeps out of the picture, the vernacular is recorded without irony or appeal, and the result is neither a set of fine prints nor a reportage but a sequence. Atget’s record of Paris, which Evans knew and admired, stood behind it, and The Swerve holds at 8.8. Migrant Mother, made in the same decade for the same programme and standing at 8.4, perfected a way of seeing rather than turning from one, and holds The Swerve at 7.4.
Movement III
The woman in Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife is Allie Mae Burroughs, who appears later in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. She is looked at frontally and at rest, without pity and without pleading. Her face is the one in the first part held at full gravity, close to the icon, and it anchors the part. The men on a southern street are looked at in the same way. The dignity of the sitters is disclosed by what the photograph withholds: the appeal that the social photography of the day made to the viewer on their behalf.
The book rises in a few places, and the rises are quiet. The graveyard at Bethlehem sets a cross in the foreground and stacks the houses and the mills behind it, the dead and the works in one plane, with something of dread. The penny portraits become uncanny at length. In the second part the wooden churches and the Greek Revival houses carry a plain grandeur. Between these the sequence is deliberately level, and many plates give interest and recognition rather than height.
The Sublime stands at 7.7, the lowest of the twelve. Elevation is withheld by design, in the flat light and the frontal camera and the refusal of any drama of sky or gesture, and a work is not credited with what it withholds. Migrant Mother holds The Sublime at 8.3 by gravity held still in one face; the book has such a face, and around it many plates that do not ask to be lifted.
Movement IV
The turn from the first part to the second is the book’s argument. The people withdraw and their buildings remain: frame houses, wooden churches, Greek Revival and Victorian houses, the built country without the people who built it. The faces become facades. The houses are portrayed as faces, frontal, at rest, and the tenant farmer’s wife was as frontal as a facade. One law governs both parts: the made world, looked at plainly, as evidence of the people who made it, without comment. Nothing breaks it but a few early plates whose tilted modernist angle belongs to another law, and a tone that at times tips into irony.
The form is the knowledge. As single prints on a wall these photographs would be documents of places; in the book, one plate to a spread with the facing page blank, each image has the silence of an object, and the order sets face against facade and poster against person. In a magazine with captions and text the same pictures would plead; as a portfolio they would be fine prints. The plan is compelled, and so are its hinges, but the middle of each part yields: a street view or a frame house could be exchanged for another from the same campaign, and the exhibition’s own order shows that the sequence was not single. The Inevitable stands at 8.3, The Living Form at 8.8.
The archetype is America, read from its surfaces: Main Street, the roadside, the Southern square, the Northern mill, the frontier church, the abandoned car, the grave. The passage of the living into their relics is built, and the auto graveyard and the graves at Bethlehem stand where the book turns to ruin. But the American place is assembled from instances and carried by the title, and The Archetypal Deep holds at 8.2. The Grapes of Wrath, the same country in the same years, stands level at 8.6 and holds it at 8.9; Leaves of Grass, the earlier catalogue of America from its common things whose plan this book inherits, stands at 9.1.
Movement V
The book reorganised what a photograph and a book of photographs could be: the documentary style made the medium’s own art, and the sequenced book made its principal form. The reach is named. Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958 and 1959) took its plan, its subject and its sequence from it. Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus were shown as heirs of the plain style in New Documents (1967), at the same museum. The colour work of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston in the 1970s stands in its line, and the books of Ed Ruscha and the typologies of the Bechers carry its deadpan record of the built vernacular. Pressure on Tradition stands at 9.0, held there because the reach is concentrated in one medium.
The questions it raised remain open: whether the plain style is objective or the most composed of styles, whether the book is an elegy for a vernacular America or a celebration of it, how the two parts read against each other, how the government photographs became an art book. Alan Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs (1989) closes on it, and John Szarkowski’s writing returned to it repeatedly. Eighty-eight years on, the book survives whole through repeated reissues, its sequence and layout intact, and its prints are held in museum collections. The hang of 1938 is lost. The Imperishable stands at 9.0.
The book holds labour, the family, commerce, the state, history, race, the sacred and the image itself in one gaze and one sequence, and keeps out interior consciousness, the natural order beyond the made, and story; The Encompassed stands at 7.9, high for a book of photographs. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The Epochal Gate is not, at The Archetypal Deep alone, and the aggregate is below the summit in any case. It stands at 8.6, in Tier IV.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on the sequence, since that is the unit. The two-part plan is compelled: the first part holds people among their images, the second the built country without them, and the argument is the passage from one to the other, the faces becoming facades. Inside each part the subtractive test bites at the hinges. Penny Picture Display, a wall of small identical portraits, is the book’s statement of its own method and cannot go; Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, the one face held at full gravity, anchors the first part. Posters, cars, signboards and graves recur and bind plate to plate. What yields is the middle of each part, where a street view or a frame house could be exchanged for another from the same campaign without loss; the exhibition’s other order shows the order was not single.
Score: 8.3 / 10
What is brought into the open can be stated, and it holds. A civilisation can be read in its vernacular, its signs, shopfronts, posters, cars and houses, as faithfully as in its monuments, and the plain made world of ordinary Americans is a record of who they are. The people of the Depression are citizens, not cases: looked at frontally and at rest, without pity or pleading, they are given their dignity by the withholding of the appeal that the social photography of the day made. And through the image alone: the country is saturated with pictures of itself, and the book sets its own among them. Held below the top because the book declines to state, and some of what it gives is a tone, a cool attention, rather than a claim.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Elevation is withheld by design, and the axis records it. The light is flat and even, the camera frontal, with no drama of sky or gesture. The book rises in places: the tenant farmer’s wife, a face held at a gravity close to the icon; the graveyard at Bethlehem, its cross in the foreground and the mills and houses stacked behind, the dead and the works in one plane, with something of dread; the penny portraits, uncanny at length, a wall of a nation’s faces at a cent each; the plain grandeur of the wooden churches and Greek Revival houses. These are summits of quiet. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the level ground between them: many plates give interest and recognition rather than height, and a work is not credited with what it withholds.
Score: 7.7 / 10
The archetype is America itself, a nation read from its surfaces: Main Street and the small town, the roadside, the Southern square, the Northern mill, the frontier church, the abandoned car, the grave. Some of this is built and not evoked. The two parts are a structure of the living and their relics: the people of the first give way to the houses they built and left, so that the nation passes into its own architecture, and the auto graveyard and the graves at Bethlehem stand where the book turns to ruin. The particular stays wholly particular, a named street in Selma or Atlanta, a named woman in Hale County. Held below the top because the archetype is assembled by an accumulation of instances and carried by the title, not borne by one load-bearing figure or story.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The inheritance was threefold: the pictorialist print and its successor, the high modernist print of Stieglitz and his circle, the photograph as the equivalent of its maker’s feeling; the social documentary of Riis and Hine, the photograph as a plea for reform; and the illustrated magazine of the 1930s, the picture subordinated to caption and story. Evans departed from all three: a plain, frontal, impersonal style that keeps the maker out of the picture and records the vernacular without irony or appeal, presented not as fine prints or reportage but as a sequenced book whose meaning lies in juxtaposition. The stake was real: against Stieglitz, then the arbiter of photography as art, in a museum, by a man in his mid thirties. Atget’s record of Paris, which Evans knew and admired, stands behind the plain style and holds the axis below the top.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Would a different form change what the work knows? Nearly everything. As single prints on a wall the photographs are documents of places; in the book they become an argument made by sequence. One plate to a spread, the facing page blank, isolates each image and gives it the silence of an object; the order sets face against facade and poster against person, and lets its motifs recur from plate to plate. Set in a magazine with captions and text it would become reportage, and plead; as a portfolio it would be a set of fine prints. The two parts are the knowledge of a passage from the people to their buildings. Held below the top because the exhibition, the other half of the unit, hung another order, so that the form is strong rather than single, and some plates could shift without loss.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: eighty-eight years of rereading, and a book reissued many times. The questions stay open. Is the plain style objective, or the most composed of styles? Is the book an elegy for a vernacular America or a celebration of it, and how much of it is irony? How should the two parts be read against each other, and what does the order argue? What is the relation between the government photographs and the art book that took them? Alan Trachtenberg’s Reading American Photographs (1989) closes on this book, and John Szarkowski’s writing at the same museum returned to it repeatedly. Return to the plates yields detail that reproduction hides. Held a step below the top because the debates circle the style and its sequence more than they find new meaning in the images.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Published, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of American photography and the photographic book. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a photograph and a book of photographs could be, the documentary style made the medium’s own art and the sequenced book made its principal form. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958 and 1959) took its plan, its subject and its sequence from this book; Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and Diane Arbus were shown as heirs of the plain style in the Museum’s New Documents (1967); the colour work of Stephen Shore and William Eggleston in the 1970s stands in its line; Ed Ruscha’s books of gas stations and apartment buildings and the Bechers’ typologies carry its deadpan record of the built vernacular. Held at 9.0, not above, because the reach is concentrated in one medium.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at eighty-eight years. Form: the book survives whole, its sequence and its layout kept through repeated reissues; it carries most of the unit, and it is intact. The exhibition as hung does not survive and is known through its checklist and record, a loss charged lightly. Presence: continuous within photography, in print, taught and cited; wide, but chiefly within one art. Fabric: the vintage gelatin silver prints are held in museum collections, and the material is sound. Every plate is fixed to the 1930s, but that moment is the work’s subject, and the book has outlived the conditions that made it. The usual figure for its age, not the widest, for the lost hang and a presence confined chiefly to one art.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Judged as command of photography, of printing and of sequence. A large-format camera set square to its subject, so that facades read as planes and verticals stay vertical; light chosen to be even and full, holding detail in the shadows and in the white of clapboard; framing that takes in the whole sign or shopfront without crop or tilt; the people held at rest. The editing is itself a craft of the highest kind here, choosing from years of work and placing what was chosen, and the design, rectos and blanks, is the maker’s decision. What holds the axis is range of hand: a few early plates, made with smaller cameras, are slighter and lean on the modernist angle Evans later gave up, and the plain style, once grasped, asks a narrower range of the hand than the densest painting.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a studio window in New York, all commerce and signage, and a wooden church in the South or a Greek Revival house of the second part, all form and silence. They obey one law: the made world, looked at frontally and plainly, as evidence of the people who made it, without comment. The law governs the faces, the tenant farmer’s wife as frontal as a facade, and the facades, the houses portrayed as faces; city and town, North and South, posters and graves. The range is wide, people, signs, machines, buildings, the living and the dead, and the law holds across it: coherence over breadth, not by exclusion. Held below the top for the few early plates whose tilted modernist angle belongs to another law, and for a tone that at times tips into irony against plain regard.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Orders held: labour, in the tenant farmer’s wife, the steelworks and the workers on the street; the family, in that portrait and in the homes of the second part; commerce, in the signs, shops, studios and roadside stands; the state, in the Legion, the monuments and, by implication, the agency that paid for many plates; history, in the Greek Revival and Victorian houses, the Civil War memorials and the ruin of the auto graveyard; race, in the minstrel bill and the Black citizens of Southern towns; the sacred, in the churches and the graveyard; and the image itself. One gaze and one sequence integrate them; they are not listed. What holds the axis is what the plain style keeps out: interior consciousness, the natural order beyond the made, and story. For a book of photographs the figure is high.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.6 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition and The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Swerve, The Living Form and The Inner Law at 8.8. A book that made the documentary style the medium’s own art and the sequenced book its principal form, with a reach running through The Americans, New Documents and the colour work of the 1970s; a form that survives whole through repeated reissues; a plain style turned against the expressive print, the reformer’s plea and the magazine at once; a sequence in which the order is the argument; and one law of frontal regard that holds from the shopfront to the church.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.7: elevation withheld by design, rising to a few summits of quiet with level ground between. Next above it, The Encompassed at 7.9, wide in the orders it holds but without interior consciousness, the natural order or story, and The Archetypal Deep at 8.2, America assembled from instances and carried by the title rather than borne by one figure.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 8.7, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet at one condition: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.8, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0 and The Imperishable at 9.0 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.2 falls three tenths short, the American place being assembled from an accumulation of instances and carried by the title rather than borne by a load-bearing figure or story. The Universal Minimum is met, the lowest axis it governs being The Sublime at 7.7 against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.9. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 102.6, an average of 8.55 that displays 8.6, short of the 9.0 the summit requires; the aggregate holds the book in Tier IV, and the Epochal Gate would withhold the summit besides.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the book, held well as a book and as a sequence in outline, including its two-part plan and many of its plates, less well plate by plate in order, and thinly as an exhibition. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is American Photographs by Walker Evans, the sequence of 1938 as one work: the book published that year by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in two parts, one plate to a spread on the right-hand page with the facing page blank, with an essay by Lincoln Kirstein after the plates; and the exhibition of the same name at the Museum in the autumn of 1938, scored as made and as recorded. The book is the enduring form and carries most of the weight. The exhibition hung its prints in an order that was not the book’s; its sequence is not known in detail, and its loss as a hang is weighed on The Imperishable alone. The government files from which many plates were drawn, the later reissues, the prints in collections, the negatives and Kirstein’s essay are context, and are not scored. Plates are named by their titles; the graveyard at Bethlehem is described, not titled. The only words quoted are the title of the book and the titles of plates. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of plates and their division between the two parts, which plate opens the book, where the titles of the plates are printed, the full span of dates of the photographs, the order of the plates within each part, whether Evans wrote any text in the book beyond the titles, whether the exhibition was the Museum’s first one-person show of a photographer, the number, sizes and mounting of the prints it hung, where Evans’s negatives are held, the years of particular reissues, and whether a later book at the same museum was modelled on its format.