A Vision of America

Walker Evans is to photography what Levi Strauss & Co. is to blue jeans. Although neither the cleareyed photographer nor the no-nonsense clothing manufacturer has created anything out of thin air, both have perfected a form that has gone on to be so influential it is now an integral part of American identity.

Like the riveted denim work pants, Evans’ unsentimental pictures of ordinary folks, houses and cities capture the spirit of a nation engineered to work. In these plain, often painfully straightforward works--as in the world they depict--punching the clock year after year counts for a whole lot more than the pleasures of leisure and the niceties of aristocratic refinement.

At the J. Paul Getty Museum, two terrific exhibitions outline Evans’ achievement by setting up vivid comparisons and contrasts. One of the best things about these profoundly democratic shows is that they work visually.

Rather than asking viewers to take anything on faith (or to read lengthy wall labels written by experts), each invites you to see with your own eyes the similarities that link Evans to his predecessors and contemporaries, as well as the differences that distinguish him from both. The larger of the two shows goes even further, presenting works by subsequent generations whose visions were shaped by Evans’ point-blank pictures.

As with most things American, it’s best to begin with the biggest. Go first to “Walker Evans & Company: Works From the Museum of Modern Art,” which was shown in New York last year. This sprawling yet sensible show features 55 black-and-white photographs by Evans (1903-1975) and 151 photographs, paintings, sculptures and drawings by more than 70 other artists.

In the first gallery of the eight-part exhibition hang three gorgeous silver prints by August Sander (1876-1964), a German photographer known for vast series of portraits that catalog his countrymen by occupation. “The Earthbound Farmer” (1910), “Peasant Woman” (1914) and “Farming Generations” (1912) contrast dramatically with three similarly composed pictures by Evans: “Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama,” “Alabama Cotton Tenant Farmer Wife” and “Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama” (all from 1936).

Although there’s nothing idealized or dreamy about Sander’s face-to-face photographs, each of the people they portray embodies the stolidity and dignity of the Old World. Dressed in their Sunday best, the meaty men, women and children in these pictures fold their hands formally, sit up straight and meet the gaze of viewers with heads held high. Clearly proud of their place in a world that is held together by established cultural traditions, they even appear to be rich in the wisdom that comes with hard-won struggles.

To look from Sander’s modestly successful farmers to Evans’ dirt-poor sharecroppers is to feel as if the gates of heaven have slammed shut, knocking you into a hellish pit from which there is no escape. Bare feet, bare backs, torn dresses and safety-pinned hand-me-downs are the norm. Gone is the atmosphere of well-mannered composure and civilized decorum. In its place is an unforgiving universe in which desperate people struggle to survive.

Nevertheless, there’s nothing animalistic or beastly about them. Although suspicion can be read in their tight-lipped faces, along with tension and discomfort, there’s no shame and very little embarrassment. In a world bereft of redemption, where the only dignity must be dredged up from within, these anonymous individuals somehow manage to do so, endowing their sorry surroundings with humanity.

On the opposite wall, eight romantic pictures of empty Paris streets, alleys and canals by Eugene Atget (1857-1927) are juxtaposed with four of Evans’ photographs of buildings in Maine, Alabama and Louisiana. No people appear in either group of works, but that is where their similarities end.

The Frenchman’s sepia-toned images from the first decades of the 20th century appear to be haunted by the ghostly presences of all the people who once passed along them. In contrast, Evans’ crisp pictures do not gaze longingly on the past. The functional things they candidly depict are oriented toward the present: Ready to be used, renovated or thrown away, they embody an ethos of sober, sometimes harsh pragmatism.

The rest of the exhibition builds upon the naked, unadorned quality of these photographs, using it to define American identity as fundamentally alien to its European counterpart. To flesh out our unique character, the show’s sections have been arranged thematically, focusing on the automobile, advertising, Hollywood imagery, people in the street and on subways, as well as domestic interiors and exteriors.

The expansive parade begins with classic photographs by Edward Weston, Marion Post Wolcott and Ralph Steiner, all of which play off Evans’ ever-present depictions of similar subjects. It continues with cool yet absorbing works by Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Harry Callahan and Henry Wessel.

Evans’ influence on subsequent generations is emphasized in curiously skewed works by Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, John Divola, Joel Sternfeld and Cindy Sherman. A smartly selected handful of paintings, sculptures and screenprints by Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Gober demonstrates that Evans’ influence reaches well beyond photography, shaping the way artists and viewers see the world.

Downstairs and across a courtyard, “The American Tradition & Walker Evans: Photographs From the Getty Collection” presents 35 of Evans’ photographs alongside 78 pictures made by his countrymen. More rigorously historical than its thematically arranged counterpart, this engaging exhibition sketches the background out of which Evans’ work emerged.

Organized chronologically, it begins with a group of daguerreotypes from the 1840s and 1850s by unknown American photographers. These postcard-like views of the urban environment and mug shots of convicted criminals are composed with the same square-up-and-shoot directness employed by Evans. Their materials, however, endow them with the aura of otherworldly magic. This distinguishes them from Evans’ gritty pictures, in which precision, objectivity and distance eradicate the residue of spiritualism.

As a whole, think of this exhibition as a step-by-step journey away from the reassuring majesty of the world depicted in Sander’s portraits of farmers to the scary, stripped-bare realism of Evans’ sharecroppers. As you move through its four galleries, romance, grandeur and artistic pretensions are swept away by increasingly vivid depictions of everyday reality.

A pivotal shift comes at the turn of the century, from salt prints and albumen prints (by such photographers as Andrew Russell and Carleton Watkins) to platinum prints and silver prints (by Adam Clark Vroman and William Rau). While the former give a hazy, golden glow to everything they depict, the latter cast the world in a less enchanting and far less precious light. Their metallic sheen gives them the glare of brightly lit scientific experiments, replacing quaint poetry with sober rationality.

Several of Evans’ immediate predecessors follow this logic to its conclusion in formalist abstraction. Exquisitely composed prints by Charles Sheeler, Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand from the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s turn the world into beautiful patterns defined by line and shape, light and shadow.

More attuned to Evans’ drive to document the messy complexity of the social world, many of his contemporaries turned their cameras on the people around them. Poignant pictures by Helen Levitt, Berenice Abbott, Lewis W. Hine and Dorothea Lange scrutinize anonymous individuals doing everyday things.

While these emotionally loaded images are similar to Evans’, they are often constrained by the stridence of the arguments they make or the conclusions they force. Evans’ photographs stand out because they are both pointed and open-ended. Without a trace of sensationalism, they capture the imperfect, unfinished drama of life in a modern democracy, which includes a viewer’s freedom to make up one’s own mind.

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* “Walker Evans & Company: Works From the Museum of Modern Art,” through Sept. 16; “The American Tradition & Walker Evans: Photographs From the Getty Collection,” through Oct. 28, J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, (310) 440-7360. Closed Mondays. Parking $5; reservations required for weekday parking.