Why Walker Evans’ American Photographs Feel Like Déjà Vu

Seventy-five years ago, The Museum of Modern Art staged their first exhibition devoted to the work of a single photographer—Walker Evans: American Photographer. That show brought together many of Walker Evans’ photographs done for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to record life during the Great Depression. With Walker Evans: American Photographs, which runs through January 26, 2014 at the MoMA, it’s déjà vu all over again as America finds itself mired in another economic crisis and Evans’ art holds up a mirror. As apolitical as Evans himself, Evans’ photos show an America of the past that looks and feels like the America of today, while also giving a message of hope for the future. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why Walker Evans’ American Photographs Feel LikeDéjà Vu."

[Image: Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975). Parked Car, Small Town Main Street. 1932. Gelatin silver print. 5 1/2 x 8 15/16″ (14 x 22.7 cm), printed c. 1970 by James Dow. Lily Auchincloss Fund. Credit: The Museum of Modern Art. © 2013 Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art.]

[Many thanks to The Museum of Modern Art for the image above and press materials related to Walker Evans: American Photographs, which runs through January 26, 2014.]

 

Hello, Norma Jean: The Lost LOOK Photos of Marilyn Monroe

Any list of the most photographed people in history certainly has to include Marilyn Monroe. Just when you think we’ve seen every possible image of the iconic starlet, a new trove appears out of nowhere. Marilyn, August 1953: The Lost LOOK Photos by John Vachon, featuring photography by John Vachon and text by Brian Wallis, doesn’t just add to the mountain of Marilyn pictures, but provides a new perspective on both the actress and the mythos of Marilyn behind which the heart and mind of Norma Jean Mortensen hid. Both a book of photography and a book about photography and fame, Marilyn, August 1953 allows us to the star as collaborator in the star-making rather than the passive victim of “Candle in the Wind” fame. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Hello, Norma Jean."

[Image: © The Estate of John Vachon. Dover Publications, Inc.]

[Many thanks to Dover Publications for providing me with a review copy of Marilyn, August 1953: The Lost LOOK Photos by John Vachon, featuring photography by John Vachon and text by Brian Wallis.]

Heights and Depths

I’d love to know what percentage of art-related calendars consist of the art of Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, and Ansel Adams. The number has to be staggering. Born February 20, 1902, Ansel Adams has become over the years the comfortable-as-an-easy-chair photographer of choice for many Americans the same way that Rockwell has become synonymous with Americana and Kinkade with kitsch. Images such as Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (above, from 1941) simply take your breath away with their composition and beauty. Black and white photography never seems archaic in Adams’ hands. The tonalities just leap out at you. Adams also had the ability to frame an image in such a way that it seemed unfamiliar yet recognizable—just changed enough to make you look at it with fresh eyes. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico could almost serve as a pendant to the “Earthrise” photo taken by astronaut William Anders of the Apollo 8 mission that landed on the moon.

Unlike Alfred Stieglitz, Adams never resorted to distorting tricks to make his photographs more painterly, which was the ideal of much early photography. Instead, Adams pushed the technical limitations of photography to the brink ,experimenting with sharpened focus, increased contrast, different rates of exposure, different types of paper, and other darkroom magic to achieve realer-than-real images such as Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California (above, from 1944). Adams helped further photography as a medium when he founded with Edward Weston the Group f/64, which eventually became the photography department of the MoMA. Thanks to Adams’ efforts, photography grew from a poor cousin to painting and the other accepted fine arts to a medium on equal standing. Adams’ work also preserved much of the natural beauty of the American west, particularly that of Yosemite National Park. Sadly, much of the actual land has been altered by climate changes, but at least we have Adams’ photographs to remind us of what once was and what we have lost.



Other photographers, particularly Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, are associated with the social injustices of the first half of the twentieth century in American, but Adams also belongs in that circle. When the U.S. government detained Japanese-Americans in camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams felt compelled to fight back with his camera. Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center and took a series of photographs to demonstrate that these Japanese-Americans were “real” Americans, too. Adams faced heavy opposition (even Theodore Geisel, the future Dr. Seuss, drew cartoons questioning the loyalty of the Japanese-Americans), but he hoped that photographs such as Manzanar Baseball (above, from 1943) would change minds in a “See, they play baseball, too!” kind of way. Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans, the book that came out of this project, remains an almost-forgotten chapter of Adams career and certainly one that will never make it to the calendars. As with Norman Rockwell, we have grown too familiar with Ansel Adams and think we know him, but Adams has depths that we too often lose in his mountains.

Imperfect Friends

Lee Friedlander, Galax, Virginia, 1962; Gift of Celeste Bartos; The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2005 Lee Friedlander

America is “like a friend who is not perfect,” the photographer Lee Friedlander once said. Such imperfection never stopped Friedlander from making America and other imperfect subjects the focus of his art for half a century. A mammoth retrospective exhibition of Friedlander’s photography that began at the MoMA in 2005 and went overseas for several years now returns to the United States at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. In the catalogue to the exhibition, Peter Galassi notes Friedlander’s “signature nonchalance: distanced but full of curiosity, ironic but playful and often witty.” The face on the television at the foot of the bed in Galax, Virginia (above) looks back at us with the same nonchalance that Friedlander uses to look at his world—conscious of its flaws while celebrating its joys and pleasures.

Lee Friedlander, New Orleans, Louisiana, 1968; Stephen R. Currier Memorial Fund; The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2005 Lee Friedlander

Galassi, Chief Curator of the MoMA’s Department of Photography, brings an encyclopedic and intimate knowledge of Friedlander the man and the photographer to his essay, which spans not only the different phases of Friedlander’s career but also takes the time to place him within the larger context of the still-being-written history of the “infant” medium of photography. Growing up in Washington State, Friedlander chose photography as his destiny early on, working in a camera shop assisting the local professional, and otherwise putting all other education aside as he schooled himself on the world of photography. Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Henri Cartier-Bresson were early influences. Through Evans, who became a personal friend to Friedlander, Lee discovered Eugène Atget, whose cityscapes influenced such photographs by Friedlander as New Orleans, Louisiana (above). “They invented what we now call the history of photography,” Galassi writes, “a lifeline of pictures, many of whose most creative protagonists had not enjoyed—or been hampered by—the arrangements and ambitions of high art.” Galassi wonderfully shows how that history of photography was literally written on the fly, and how Friedlander helped shape the course of that history.

Lee Friedlander, Miles Davis, 1969; Purchase, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2005 Lee Friedlander

Friedlander allowed himself one passion other than photography—jazz. “I was dumbfounded,” Friedlander said of hearing Charlie Parker play. “I somehow knew exactly where he was coming from. He made me understand that anything is possible.” Galassi beautifully relates how this jazz sensibility merged with Friedlander’s photography, riffing on how the two art forms paralleled one another. “Each art arose unbidden from vernacular roots in the early part of the twentieth century and reached greatness in a hurry,” he writes. “Neither was something you could learn in school. There was no academy, but by 1950 there was a tradition—a collective maturity, shaped by distinctive individual voices, that welcomed and challenged fresh talent to enrich it further.” Friedlander’s love of jazz allowed him to create portraits of jazz and blues musicians distinguished by their warmth and tact, such as his portrait of Miles Davis (above; a similar shot was later used for the cover of a Davis greatest hits collection). “Lee’s pictures show who these people were when they weren’t being who they were,” Atlantic Records producer Joel Dorn once said. Davis, famous for his intimidating “Prince of Darkness” persona, comes across as an insecure, deeply introspective figure in Friedlander’s photograph.

Lee Friedlander, Father Duffy. Times Square, New York City, 1974; Purchase, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2005 Lee Friedlander

Friedlander’s consciousness of photography’s history as an art spurred him early on to collect his photographs in books, giving shape to the huge mass of work sprawling across the decades. Over two dozen books now allow anyone to have access to Friedlander’s work and, more importantly, how he envisioned it presented. From tomes dedicated to quirky self-portraits to the life of everyday factory workers (“for him,” Galassi writes, “work isn’t about things; it’s about people”), Friedlander brings the same sensibility that sees the flaws and beauty of the world and people around him. The American Monument, a 1976 collection of photographs of statues, “makes hay with the foibles and failures of our civic pronouncements, and yet makes room, too, for heroism and communal pride.” The statue of Father Duffy (above) seems lost in the sea of Times Square commercialism, neatly questioning the place of such values of Duffy’s heroism amidst the noise of modern existence. Photographing such works during the dark days of Vietnam and Watergate, Friedlander published his works during the Bicentennial year as a chanticleer call reminding us of what was once good about America and what could be good again.
Lee Friedlander, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming, 1999; Collection of the photographer © 2005 Lee Friedlander

Looking through the almost eight hundred images in the catalogue, half of which appear in the exhibition, you wonder at the versatility and expansive nature of Friedlander’s photography. Just when you begin to expect an artist of the concrete jungles, you discover the Friedlander of natural beauty, as in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (above), which one critic described as “like Ansel Adams on crack.” Speaking of the beauty of his native Washington State, Friedlander says, “I was indigenous to it. I felt part of it, then and now… The same wonder still exists and I feel the same connection and belonging. It is mine, and I am its.” America, that “imperfect friend,” remains a friend not just despite the flaws but also for such moments of perfect natural splendor.

Lee Friedlander, Nude, 1982; Purchase, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2005 Lee Friedlander

If Friedlander’s takes on nature are like druggy Ansel Adams, his nudes are a poor man’s Edward Weston. At first, I couldn’t help but mentally compare Friedlander’s nudes (above) to the high art conceptions of Weston and find them flawed. These flaws, however, are their beauty. “The nudes nicely elucidate the circular fecundity of Friedlander’s art,” Galassi writes, “in which the described and the description—the inexhaustible quiddity of the world and the ways photography can explore it—follow up on each other like the chicken and the egg.” Friedlander’s nudes, many of whom were personal friends of the artist, are not sexy or pornographic in any sense. The decidedly un-model-like women seem vulnerable and real in their living room settings, free of fantasy and freed by the acceptance of their physical imperfections captured by Friedlander’s camera. Friedlander dismisses the concept of ideal beauty with the power of fact, which proves both more powerful and beautiful in his eyes.

Lee Friedlander, California, 1997; Robert and Joyce Menschel Fund; The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2005 Lee Friedlander

Like those by Rembrandt, Friedlander’s self-portraits show him at different ages striking different poses and guises, such as in the quirky self-portrait titled California (above). The artist who made so many images of the dappled nature of reality doesn’t flinch on turning that same eye upon himself in all his imperfection. Snapshots are famous for catching life at its most real, completely unstaged. Friedlander excels in bringing a snapshot mentality to his photography, both capturing reality and putting a personal signature upon it. While the 1955 photographic landmark The Family of Man argued through photography that we are all the same, regardless of place or time, Friedlander’s body of work seconds that emotion and adds the important coda that we are all the same—imperfect, and beautiful for and not despite our imperfections.


[Many thanks to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for providing me with a review copy of Peter Galassi’s Friedlander and for the images from the exhibition.]

Faces in the Crowd

Unknown, "The Artist", c. 1900-1910; cyanotype, image: 9.6 x 12 cm (3 3/4 x 4 3/4); mount: 9.7 x 12.3 cm (3 13/16 x 4 13/16), National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert E. Jackson

Flipping through the catalogue to the National Gallery of Art’s exhibition The Art of the American Snapshot 1888-1978: From the Collection of Robert E. Jackson, I couldn’t help but hear Paul Simon’s song "Kodachrome" playing in my head. Like Simon’s song, The Art of the American Snapshot sees both the joy and the illusion of the snapshot, which “makes you think all the world's a sunny day,” regardless of the clouds above. By sampling from Robert E. Jackson’s collection of vintage, almost exclusively anonymous photographs, this catalogue and exhibition hold up a mirror to an America documenting itself as it simultaneously strikes the pose it wants to capture, a give and take in which the improving photographic technology fills ever-changing demands at the same time that it shapes those desires. Works by long-dead enthusiasts, such as the self-proclaimed “The Artist” (above), bring the faces of yesterday back to life, allowing us to see them and ourselves more sharply. As the forward to the catalogue puts it, these anonymous pictures “whether by intention or accident, soar above their purely personal associations to reveal more fundamental aspects of American photography and American life.”

Diane Waggoner, co-curator of the exhibition, examines the early age of photography from 1888, the year in which the first Kodak camera was released, to 1919, right after the horrors of World War I. Photography for the masses freed the idea of the portrait from the dour and unsmiling age of formal portraits. “Unlike the earlier conventions of seriousness,” Waggoner writes, “both the experimentation and theatricality of the new snapshots were almost uniformly injected with humor: photography served as an amusement.” Whereas teeth or an open mouth in pictures were considered vulgar before, now smiles and laughter were obligatory. The post mortem photograph previously taken as a family heirloom disappears in this new fascination with life. America’s growing middle class of the early twentieth century finds itself with leisure time on its hands and a Kodak to capture it with. Waggoner and her fellow essayists continually present the views of the “experts” throughout history trying to impose rules on what makes a good photo and the willful breaking of those rules by the amateur snapping away for his or her own pleasure. Waggoner’s essay and those that follow examine in great detail the role of Kodak’s marketing and advertising in shaping the photomania of America, starting with the Brownie, introduced in 1900 and “promoted… primarily, but not exclusively, to children, cultivating a previously untapped market for photography.” The marketing geniuses of Kodak later link photography and leisure, especially travel. As concepts of the family, childhood, and motherhood develop at this time—the aftershocks of the Victorian Age crossing the Atlantic—Kodak seizes these opportunities as well, culminating in the rise of the photo album as the repository of moments and memories forever.

Unknown, c. 1930; gelatin silver print, image: 5.7 x 10 cm (2 1/4 x 3 15/16); sheet: 6.4 x 10.8 cm (2 1/2 x 4 1/4); mount: 6.5 x 10.9 cm (2 9/16 x 4 5/16); National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert E. Jackson

In “Quick, Casual, Modern: 1920-1939,” Sarah Kennel picks up the trail and examines the powerful shift at that time to a visual culture in America, “where language was ceding power to image” and “snapshot photography served as an important vehicle through which Americans defined and interrogated their relationship to their rapidly changing environment.” Talking films and Technicolor in 1927, Kodachrome color film in 1936, the display of television at the 1939 World’s Fair—all of these add to the visual mania of the Jazz Age. Kennel sees “the emphasis on self-expression and play” seen in photos of this period, “harmon[izing] with the new technological, social, and consumerist order that rose from the ravages of World War I.” Speed, as captured blurrily in the photograph of the speeding motorcycle above, ruled. Even the Great Depression couldn’t slow down the race to express yourself in photographs as part of the “fast and fragmented pace of modern life.” In fact, the deprivations of the Great Depression and the anxieties of another war on the horizon caused an even greater fetish of the nuclear family, a harmonious illusion that the photograph helped not only to define but also to sustain.

Unknown, July 1951; gelatin silver print, image: 6.9 x 10.1 cm (2 11/16 x 4); sheet: 8.3 x 11.7 cm (3 1/4 x 4 5/8); National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert E. Jackson

As television assumed a central role in American culture, Sarah Greenough, co-curator of the exhibit, writes, “seeing became believing in the 1950s, and, more than at any earlier time in American history, people saw through the filter of photography.” The woman photographed in the television set above symbolizes how people of this period came to see themselves as living in one huge reality show, as we know it today. Photography pervades every aspect of American life, growing more and more casual and intrusive. Greenough sees photography at this time transcending its previous role as a definer of customs and traditions (in birthday and wedding photographs, for example) and becoming a self-conscious molder and even transformer of the individual. To illustrate her point, Greenough beautifully strings together a narrative from a suite of photographs taken by a woman identified only as “Flo,” who seemingly struggles to find some community within her apartment building and workplace through candid shots of those around her, who resist her attempts to connect through a lens. The litany of turned heads and covered faces “Flo” endured testifies to the power of photography to make many believe that it was the key to that better life promised in advertising and shown every night on TV. Even the instant gratification of the newly invented Polaroid, “convenient and fast… like the Jolly Green Giant’s frozen vegetables” hawked on TV, couldn’t quench the thirst for the elusive American dream for many.

Unknown, 1960s; chromogenic print, image: 7.9 x 7.9 cm (3 1/8 x 3 1/8); sheet: 8.8 x 8.6 cm (3 7/16 x 3 3/8); Collection of Robert E. Jackson

Matthew S. Witkovsky wraps up the survey with his take on “When the Earth Was Square: 1960-1978.” Witkovsky sees the distinctive square print of the Kodak Instamatic (introduced in 1963) as the defining “look” of the time. The increasing prevalence of color film in the 1960s adds to the illusion of photography as a reflection of “real” life. Behind this curtain, however, Witkovsky finds “a self-conscious delight taken by ordinary people in staging scenes of play.” If life is what you photograph, then the photographs are going to be full of life—staged fun if the real thing isn’t available. Vulgar gestures crop up in the pictures of this time, perhaps not as much a sign of loosening morals as much as a sign of the forced “humor” injected into photography of the 1960s and 1970s as the post-Kennedy, post-Vietnam generations coped with the fissures in the edifice of the American dream, a façade founded in part on an image captured and catapulted by photography and its surrounding visual culture. The photograph of the peace sign above succeeds as an image today in some small part due to the failures of the ideals that sign represented then.

Unknown, 1930s; gelatin silver print, image: 11.1 x 7.2 cm (4 3/8 x 2 13/16); sheet: 12 x 8.4 cm (4 3/4 x 3 5/16); National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Robert E. Jackson

Robert E. Jackson ends his collection at 1978 believing that he’s “too close to the 1980s and beyond to be able to ‘see’ a good snapshot objectively.” Perspective stands at the heart of the analysis of The Art of the Snapshot. These anonymous photographs, free of personal associations and backstories, exist as works of art now, even transparently staged photos as that above of the woman in bed next to an automobile. More importantly, they exist as artifacts of the American visual culture and that culture’s crystallization as the American dream. All Americans unconsciously buy into that dream every waking moment thanks to the constant bombardment of visuals selling us some bill of goods. The photographs of our lives fall into this great river of imagery, the tiny drops that build up and threaten the banks to overflowing. The Art of the American snapshot helps release some of the built up pressure of that imagery by breaking it down and restoring the democratizing power of the photograph, namely its capacity to allow the individual to both record and reformulate their identity with total freedom. At the same time, this catalogue and exhibit threaten to expose the cracks in the concept of American freedom, releasing the dammed up frustrations of those unable to find any true identity within that “dream” turned nightmare. Photography weaves a magical spell that life is as fun and happy as we can picture it. Once that spell is broken, and we see the images as staged rather than “true” (whatever that means), the questions become overwhelming.

Unknown, "This Modernistic point of view shows me in the center. Good?", 1930s; gelatin silver print, image: 10.1 x 5.7 cm (4 x 2 1/4); sheet: 11.4 x 7.1 cm (4 1/2 x 2 13/16); Collection of Robert E. Jackson


The photographs in The Art of the Snapshot show almost exclusively white faces and almost exclusively the middle and upper class enjoying their leisure time and family experience in a way often denied to other races and classes in our history. The faces in photos such as that marked “This Modernist point of view shows me in the center. Good?” (above) self-consciously show that wonderful life and simultaneously beg for affirmation of its existence. Are these photos “good”? Is the life shown in them “good”? More importantly, is it “real” (whatever that means)? When tracing the origin of the term “snapshot” to a hunting term, The Art of the Snapshot recalls the words of photographer Walker Evans after a shooting expedition: “I am stalking, as in the hunt. What a bagful to be taken home.” The Art of the American Snapshot is itself “a bagful to be taken home,” a thoughtful gallery of visions and ideas linked together that we should each sort and reassemble in our mental albums.

[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of this book and to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC for providing me with the images above from the exhibition.]