Dignity Through a Lens

We tend to think of Walker Evans (1903-1975) as a preeminent photographer of the agrarian American South, thanks to the astonishing book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” that he published with writer James Agee in 1941. This magnificent chronicle of the rural poor in the Depression era--born as a story idea for Fortune magazine, where Evans was later to work full time--combined Agee’s politically impassioned words with Evans’ dignified, unsentimental images. It transformed the genre of documentary reporting.

There’s a different side to Evans, however, one that’s radically dissimilar in subject if no less humanistically generous in point of view. At the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood, curator Judith Keller has assembled more than 100 photographs from the museum’s stellar collection of Evans’ gelatin silver prints to show this other side.

The subject in this thoughtful and provocative exhibition is the urban North instead of the rural South. In place of the farmer’s wagon, there’s the clattering subway car. Rather than the hand-lettered sign affixed to a country shed, we see billboard-size electrical extravaganzas lifted skyward on tall buildings.

If the pictures in “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” were all you knew of the photographer’s work, “Walker Evans: New York” might seem at first blush to be composed of images made by a different artist. Evans grew up in the Midwest (St. Louis, Chicago, Toledo) and after 1965 lived principally in Connecticut, where he taught at Yale. For nearly 40 years in between, however, he called New York his home; the Getty’s surprising show surveys images from that big-city hometown.

Given the unexpected nature of the subject, the only disappointment is the absence of an exhibition catalog. The Getty has certainly made a commitment to Evans’ art, as evidenced by the large number of his works in the museum’s permanent collection--some 1,300 in all, making it the world’s largest--as well as by the independent publications it has produced about those holdings. Most recently, a slim new volume with an enjoyable essay by writer Andrei Codrescu focuses on the prominent theme of signage in Evans’ work, featuring 49 photographs made in the U.S. and Cuba.

But an exhibition catalog is a different creature, one that demonstrates the institution’s priorities in its public program. As a document of a public event, it gives scholarly weight to the transitory pleasures offered by a temporary show. A catalog is sorely missed here.

The exhibition is loosely divided into four sections. “The City” is composed of architectural subjects distinct to the time and place--specifically, soaring skyscrapers and the iconic Brooklyn Bridge. “The Street” gets down on the pavement, recording the jumbled diversity of urban dwellers, city shops and advertising signage. “The Subway” goes below the surface, to chart the mobility of life on underground wheels. A final room examines New York’s corporate canyons in the early 1960s, including a series for Fortune on the changing nature of male attire.

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The first three sections could be characterized most simply as: looking up, looking across and looking down. Evans comes across here as an American Atget--a gentle but committed explorer on a new urban frontier. Whether the subject is a Sunday afternoon passed on a park bench in the Bronx, young men in shirt-sleeves and ties sitting in a corporate plaza or a sailor in a subway car--his dreams given the form of a thought-balloon by an advertising placard above his head--Evans’ most compelling pictures are marked by a ruminative sense of casual curiosity and everyday observation.

This is a distinctly modern pleasure, unique to 20th century urban experience, familiar to anyone who has enjoyed passing time in a public place just watching the world go by. There’s an etiquette to the activity, of course, especially when people, rather than buildings, are its focus; it has to do with negotiating shared or communal space, while still preserving an element of privacy, integrity and independent autonomy.

That code of personal urban conduct is dramatically breached in Evans’ subway photographs--which is why they are especially riveting, offering a high point in the show. The casual glances you would ordinarily make around a subway car, taking in your fellow passengers, are replaced in these pictures by the unflinching stare of Evans’ camera. The photographs offer the guilty pleasure of prolonged scrutiny, one on one, which in daily life might easily get you a stern rebuke (or worse).

There’s something uncanny but unprepossessing about the men and women in these subway pictures. Even when Evans’ subjects return the stare, it’s with a seeming obliviousness to the presence of a camera. It turns out there’s a good reason why.

These are spy pictures. Evans took them with the aid of a small camera secretly affixed to his chest. Most of the subway riders never knew their portrait had been made. As a result, they display a degree of casual honesty (if that’s the right word) you simply never find in photographic portraits that are posed.

Evans plainly knew he had something special in these surreptitious portraits, which were shot between 1938 and 1941. Yet he also knew that in making them he was violating a code of urban conduct. So he patiently waited more than 20 years to publish them, thus preserving the privacy and integrity of his unwitting subjects--his fellow urbanites.

About three-quarters of the pictures in the Getty show were taken in the grueling period between 1929, the year Wall Street collapsed, and 1941, when America entered World War II. In an era of extreme difficulty, the ethical core of humanist dignity that helped make “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” so distinctive a chronicle of the rural South is also in fine working order in Evans’ compelling pictures of the urban North.

* J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, through Oct. 11. Closed Mondays. Parking reservations: (310) 440-7300.