Mundane Glories

During the 1930s and ‘40s, when grand and pristine Western vistas transfixed other American photographers, Walker Evans used his camera to bore into the lives of Alabama sharecroppers, New York City subway riders and small-town burghers. The result was a remarkable body of work recording America as it was, with all the rough, tawdry and desperate edges--and much more.

The triumph of Evans was that he profoundly changed how we have come to view ourselves. He has demonstrated that ordinary people and the most mundane artifacts of their lives, not just great men and big events, teach history’s most enduring lessons.

Now open at the J. Paul Getty Museum are an extraordinary pair of exhibits, “Walker Evans: Before + After,” that places Evans in the company of those photographers who influenced him, and then with the legions whom he influenced.

Three of Evans’ iconographic Depression images of Alabama sharecroppers hang with a trio of portraits of German farm families taken between 1910 and 1914 by August Sander. We are the same, the grouping says quietly, we share the same struggles. A 1987 study by Joel Sternfeld of two suspendered Wall Street interns at lunchtime captures a certain time and ethos just as surely as does Evans’ 1935 portrait of a uniformed and mustached American Legionnaire.

Evans’ work, on display through October, has endured because he invites us to consider the everyday--the battered tin forks hanging from a kitchen wall, the flowers atop a dresser in a 1933 New York house, even a Pennsylvania automobile junkyard. He reveals those scenes not just as symbols of poverty or distress or wealth but as glimpses of the aspirations and fates that shape us all.