Boston Globe: Walker Evans close up: Portland Museum of Art shows ‘American Photographs’ as they were meant to be seen

Walker Evans close up: Portland Museum of Art shows ‘American Photographs’ as they were meant to be seen

This article appears in The Boston Globe.

By Murray White

PORTLAND, Maine —I can’t help but think something strange has happened, and nothing good, when the pictures of Walker Evans offer something like comfort. When I arrived at the Portland Museum of Art recently to see “Walker Evans: American Photographs,” which opened earlier this month, its small gallery was predictably crowded. People looked closely, frame by frame, captivated by the subtle miseries of the many famous Depression-era images tiled around the four walls of a single room. In this era of grinding uncertainty, maybe there’s solace in seeing the hardship Evans captured — even if it’s only to know that, eventually, it ended.

A reprise of the 1938 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that helped elevate Evans from documentarian to artist, “American Photographs” comes with a pedigree; but even without it, the show would be an uncommon draw. It could just as easily have been called “People Love Walker Evans, So Here Are Some Walker Evans Pictures,” and it would be just as true.

So deep a degree of familiarity, especially coupled with national pride — what is Evans but an American icon, and deservedly so? — can easily evolve into nostalgia. That can make his work seem soothing, however at odds with his intentions. But look a little longer, and you’ll see so much more.

It’s been a long time since I saw any of these pictures in person, not to mention in bunches. Like most images these days, they’re more likely to flit singly past my eye on either my computer screen or, depressingly, the glowing surface of the forever-pinging digital tyrant that lives in my back pocket. “American Photographs,” a bonafide revolution in its day, is a more modest one now, but a revolution nonetheless — small pictures, carefully arrayed on a wall, sized and framed as the photographer intended.

Being there in front of them reminded me of how much we lose to our unavoidable screen-driven reality. Evans’s pictures are small, some of them postcard-size, demanding real attention and close looking. It’s a powerful reminder that scale — utterly lost in a virtual world, where a postage stamp occupies the same visual real estate as a history painting — matters in photography, a fact Evans knew well.

Big pictures stand you back; you can’t take them all in at once. Drawing you close was what Evans had in mind. (A favorite of mine, not part of this show, is of the Brooklyn Bridge, printed thumbnail-size with a huge mat, forcing you to almost press your nose to the museum glass). For Evans, a preeminent American visualist, what was in the picture was never more important than the picture itself. A photograph of a family of tenant farmers belting out hymns captures not just the figures, frank and forlorn, but the silver-gray backdrop of flaking clapboard behind them; a textural, geometric element, hard versus soft, light against dark, that imbues the scene with pictorial verve.

His enduringly famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, her pale scowl softened by those mournful, damning eyes, captures the stark sunlight that provokes her squint. But it has the shimmering presence unique to the gelatin silver print: sharp contrast, bleak pallor, rich interplay between shadows and light. She may grab you, but it’s the picture that holds you long and tight.

Evans first came to renown on assignment with Fortune magazine in 1936, accompanying the writer James Agee to the southern dustbowl of the Great Depression to capture the hardship endured by sharecroppers in an era of perpetual want. The assignment, conceived as a feature and photo essay for the magazine, spiraled well beyond that scope; it evolved into “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” Agee’s now totemic book published in 1941.

Some of the pictures in “American Photographs” came from the project, Burroughs among them; many others came from Evans’s time working as a photographer in the South for the New Deal-era Farm Security Administration, both before and after. During his time there, his catalog ballooned; it also evolved past something like straight documentary, which curators at MoMA could plainly see. Anyone could shoot squalor, and with Agee, Evans surely did; but few can bring to it the somber, plainspoken transcendence of visual poetry, and Evans did that, too.

Evans’s poetry was economical: short, clipped, less is more. What made those pictures different — made them Walker Evanses — was his unwavering commitment to the frame, the scene, the image itself. You’ll often hear people speak of the dignity of an Evans image, his poor subjects infused with a ragged grace. But Evans was no romantic, and that, I think, was a byproduct of a deeper mission: to make a picture whole and complete. His subjects were merely its beneficiaries. He was supremely dispassionate and, for his human subjects, ultimately clarifying. He didn’t take their picture so much as make them seen.

Evans’s pictures could also be starkly unpeopled. Those are different — he favored a handheld Leica when shooting people, and an ungainly large-format camera for cityscapes and architecture — but also so much the same. An economy of means reigns, as does the grip of transformative change. “American Photographs,” 1938 and 2021, cleaves in two along those lines, both halves working in concert to remind the viewer of his true subject: not sharecroppers, nor architecture, nor land, nor cityscape, but advancing, inevitable modernity itself.

The cool precision of Evans’s pictures of signage and architecture, with their crisp fonts and right-angled structures, are cheerily inhuman; they speak of a rising world in which things, not people, matter most. What’s new becomes old fast: In one picture, a neat row of Model Ts angle-parked in Saratoga Springs shimmer atop rain-slicked streets, stiffly arranged like freshly-polished knives in a drawer; in another, heaps of broken auto bodies mound up in a mechanical boneyard, the image a shambles of dusty incoherence.

You don’t have to look hard to find the metaphor: Here, sharecroppers huddled in tumbledown shacks, there, a column of lean, uniform industrial smokestacks, waiting to be activated. Evans captured the country as it leapt forward into a new, industrialized, mass consumption-driven world; he also looked, with equal dispassion, long and hard at what it left behind.