BeatRoute Magazine B.C. print e-edition - November 2016

WalkeR evanS
a revolutionary and his portrait of contemporary life ...just don’t call it art
GALEN ROBINSON-EXO
Walker Evans is, by all accounts, a
pioneer of modern photography. In
1933, his was the first solo show in
the medium to ever be exhibited at
the Museum of Modern Art in New
York. His iconic book, American
Photographs, is a defining piece of
North American photographic history.
He is regarded in the art world as
an architect of the documentary
photography genre and his influence
on modern street photography can
hardly be overstated.
Starting on October 29, the
Vancouver Art Gallery will be showing
a retrospective exhibit of Evans’ work.
This career-spanning collection,
entitled Depth of Field, is the most
comprehensive accumulation of his
work that has, to date, ever been
shown in Canada. We spoke with
Vancouver Art Gallery curator Grant
Arnold, who described Evans’ work
as “seemingly cool and detached, and
extremely descriptive… [it] doesn’t
necessarily at first glance even look
like art, but the more you look at [the
images] the more you realize there is a
poetic aspect to them which survives
over time.”
Evans was the progenitor of
what has been described as a lyrical
documentary style, documenting the
daily realities of a growing America
with a keen eye for detail. In the 1930s,
Evans’ approach to photography was
in direct contrast to that of many
of his contemporaries. At this time,
photography was not seen as an
art form on par with more classical
mediums like painting or sculpture.
There were almost no museums that
collected photography and very few
that exhibited it.
Fine art photographers like Alfred
Stieglitz and Edward Steichen were
determined to change the art world’s
perception of photography as a practice,
and thus focused on the creation of
images that would accomplish that
goal. Evans wasn’t interested in this and
regarded their work as too imitative of
other media. He preferred to capture
the world as it was and his insistence on
this point led some to describe him as
an “anti-art” photographer. As Arnold
explains it, “He looked a bit more to
newsreels and things like that as a kind
of vocabulary to base his work on…
and deliberately rejected work that
was self-consciously positioning itself as
art.” Still, he had connections with the
MoMa very early on in his career, and
while he may have publicly denounced a
“fine art” approach to the photographic
medium, his career certainly benefitted
from his relationships with the art
world’s elites.
The works on display at the
Vancouver Art Gallery will showcase the
breadth of Evans’ photographs, from the
streets of New York to portraits of the
Dust Bowl, spanning his early career in
the 1920s to images he made just before
he died in the 1970s. Also on display
will be a number of signs that Evans
collected throughout his career and
would exhibit alongside his own work
while he was alive. As Arnold describes,
“He would often just take signs he
liked from public spaces, which makes
sense when you consider how often
he would photograph signs, and they
would be pretty commonplace...some
of them would just say ‘no parking,’
but he would have been interested
in the graphic design element [of
them].” These small pieces of history
complete this exhaustive exhibition
of Evans’ exploration into the
American character.
Walker Evans: Depth of Field runs at the
Vancouver Art Gallery from October 29
– January 22.
PHOTOS BY WALKER EVANS
Walker Evans’ camera was both a news reel and a lens for a growing world.
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