ART REVIEW : Through a Lens, Hauntingly : Walker Evans Photos Evoke Indelible Images of ‘30s

“Beyond doubt, the accepted myth of our recent past is in some measure the creation of this photographer,” says scholar and curator John Szarkowski of Walker Evans. Indeed, Evans’ work, particularly his images of rural poverty shot during the Depression, has come to represent an essential aspect of America’s collective identity of the first half of this century.

Shooting what’s come to be regarded as his most important work during the 1930s when he was employed by Roosevelt’s Farm Security Administration, Evans created an indelible visual record of racism in America, the Depression, the South, the American road, roadside advertising and the birth of car culture, and the hardy souls who toughed out one of the most difficult decades of this century. Evans’ best-known work was his collaboration with writer James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” a book chronicling the lives of three tenant farming families published in 1941. Recognized today as a landmark work of documentary photography, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” included 31 images in the original edition, and 62 photographs in the reissue of 1960.

Many of these pictures shot in Alabama in 1935-36 are included in the permanent collection at the Getty, where 45 of Evans’ pictures go on exhibit today as part of “Walker Evans: An Alabama Record.” On view through June 21, the show represents just a fraction of the Getty’s extensive Evans holdings, which includes 1,100 images. This immensely moving show, which was expertly curated by Judith Keller, makes one hungry to get into the back room to see the rest of Evans’ work on the premises.

Evans’ genius can be distilled to a few central qualities: He was a deeply empathetic man who was enchanted by the world around him; he had an infallible eye for detail and an unerring sense of composition and, most important, he saw the poetry in the commonplace. At once tender and austere, Evans’ work combines the bittersweet melancholy of Edward Hopper with the brutal realism of Samuel Beckett.

Like Beckett, Evans had a talent for communicating the profound mystery and pathos of everyday life. In an image titled “Gleanhill School, Hale County Alabama,” for instance, we see a primitive, windowless one-room shack patched together out of scraps of weathered wood. The door of this crude building is ajar, and inside we see nothing but a deep well of impenetrable darkness.

Surrounded by a grove of feathery trees that appear soft to the touch, and awkwardly poised on two large boulders, the building looks as if it’s about to levitate. This is a very magical scene, at once utterly ordinary and hallucinatory.

It always seems to be high noon in Evans’ images--the light is crisp and pointedly undramatic. The piercing clarity of this light has a peculiar effect: It tweaks our sense of the passage of time and makes us acutely aware of the ephemeral nature of the present and the unbearably rich weight of the past.

Evans’ sensibility is ultimately an elegiac one. Today, however, his pictures seem to be mostly about loss, because the America he photographed is irretrievably lost. The world Evans photographed was a place of privacy, silence, space, long afternoons with time to waste, main streets and neighbors, virgin untrammeled land and an unshakable belief in the integrity of America and its future.

It is, of course, dangerous to romanticize the terrible poverty central to much of Evans’ work; nonetheless, the simplicity of American life in the ‘30s looks undeniably attractive from the ‘90s. One gets the sense that in Evans’ world there was time to think and to really look at things.

Included in the exhibition are several portraits of the tenant farmers befriended by Evans and Agee as they researched their book. Sharecroppers who lived on about $10 a month, these thin, barefoot people look shy and a bit frightened. (James Agee once wrote that these people were unnerved by Evans’ elaborate camera equipment and methodology.) Working in a formal, unembellished style of portraiture evocative of German artist August Sander--like Sander, Evans often shoots his subjects in pairs--Evans presents the people of Alabama with an unpatronizing honesty that imbues them with tremendous dignity.

If Evans’ populist leanings were out of step with his origins, his refined eye certainly wasn’t. Born in 1903 in St. Louis, into a privileged family (Evans’ father was a successful advertising copywriter), Evans was educated at private schools and originally aspired to be a writer. Frustrated with what he perceived as his lack of ability in composing prose, he turned to photography in 1928 at age 25 and immediately realized he’d found the proper vehicle for his creative voice.

Evans’ first published work appeared in 1930, as illustrations in the first edition of his friend Hart Crane’s book “The Bridge.” The next year he traveled to Boston, where he spent several months photographing Victorian houses in and around the city. (Evans’ great love of architecture and his keen eye for architectural line served him well as a photographer.)

His first solo exhibition was mounted at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, the next year he photographed victims of political oppression in Cuba, and two years later he began the Alabama work. From the beginning, Evans’ photographs seemed highly developed and mature, and the quality that makes his work so exquisite was always in full bloom. That quality is modesty. Evans was a man of singular humility who believed that the world as he found it required neither glorification nor pity from him--he simply reported what he saw. And, as is evidenced by this wonderful show, Evans saw beauty everywhere he looked.