James Polchin reviews “American Photographs,” the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition on Walker Evans:
Evans’ vision was shaped in large part by his time in Paris in the late 1920s, where he learned to discard his midwestern prohibitions against sexual and aesthetic pleasures (artists were suspicious figures in the young Evans’ household). But he also learned the pleasures of staring, a behavior his mother held to be deeply impolite. “I remember my first experience as a café sitter in Europe. There is a staring that startles the American,” he related some years later, adding that he gained from that time an ability to “stare and stare at people, shamelessly.” In Paris he perfected his skills at observing that would eventually shape the compositions and framing of his photography. He studied Baudelaire’s ideas about the aesthetic and poetic potential of everyday scenes. He read Flaubert to grasp the melancholic tenor of realism. What Evans learned in Paris was a way of looking from a distance, a voyeurism that was intimate. And this sits at the heart of American Photographs: The pleasure of staring turned into the aura of longing.
(Photo: South Street, New York, 1932, by Walker Evans, courtesy of the Getty Open Content Program)
The Dish 