Documenting the Depression

...Their "nominal" subject, Agee explained, was "North American cotton tenantry as examined in the daily living of three representative white tenant families...

...They," he might have said, are— simply, interestingly—"they...

...It was inaugurated by Edmund Wilson, no less, with his 1932 book The American Jitters (retitled The American Earthquake), which recorded observations and conversations from across the country...

...Are they my poor...

...The Federal Writers' Project employed scores of writers for similar ends, and concluded the decade with 51 major volumes in the American Guide Series...

...In all the shots the attitude is one of deliberate, conscientious indifference, beyond bleakness or mordancy: Evans' standpoint is that of the dawdler both in and apart from the crowd, the flâneur (taking a tip from Baudelaire), the Parisian of a certain type in America...

...One defining photograph, titled Penny Picture Display, depicts the window of a neighborhood photographer's studio in Savannah, Georgia, in 1936...

...His photographs of shacks and stores are mostly full front...

...Evans went to a nearby hotel...

...As for the members of the families, they posed for their pictures...

...Thepicture consists of 75 tiny photos of nameless individuals embedded in their little squares who might as well be dead, and across the whole is the word "STUDI...

...The value," he said, "and, if you like, even the propaganda value for the government lies in the record itself...

...It was only at that later time that it secured a larger reputation...

...He would not make photographs for the purpose of bringing relief to the needy...

...Evans' answer would be "No, they are not mine...

...A previous biographer, Belinda Rathbone, quotes a friend of Evans saying, "He liked to imply that he was very well bred...

...Evans was noted for his "bitter edge," Lange remarked, adding that she liked it...

...But their real subject was "to recognize the stature of a portion of unexamined existence, and to contrive techniques proper to its recording...

...They came up with three...

...The intended magazine article, never published by Fortune, was turned into a book in 1941 and then republished in 1960...

...gas stations (with peculiar frequency...

...The two men knew that the tenant families expected that their lot would be improved because these magazine people from the North had come to see them, and Agee and Evans both promised to send money and to return...

...NO POLITICS whatever," he wrote in a memo before accepting the position...

...I think he was rather a self-made well-bred man...

...Agee lived with the families...

...During the FSA years Shahn and Lange and Arthur Rothstein, among others, produced photographs of tenants and migrants meant to convey urgent concern...

...Evans was pleased to say that he and Agee had told them exactly what they were doing, and no doubt there was great integrity in their procedure...

...He would later say that he was especially influenced by Gide...

...Discovering the national vernacular, not in language but in people and things, was an established, sometimes governmentsponsored, pursuit during the Great Depression...

...His father did send him to Paris (accompanied by his mother) but that was the end for him of subsidized privilege...

...These people are specimens—noted, recorded and memorialized...

...Evans attended a series of prep schools and for one year was enrolled at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts...

...exteriors of houses and stores frozen in a state of decay...

...the rest wouldbe fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement...

...Although Agee wanted somehow to make his subject more immediate, Evans' photographs emphatically asserted the distance between the recorder and the recorded, whether of things or people...

...Though Evans participated in the general enterprise, he stood apart...

...Critic-anthropologist Constance Rourke, as editor of the Federal Art Project's Index of American Design, sent hundreds of artists into the field as well to make copies of antique quilts, weathervanes, Shaker furniture, barn ornaments and other artifacts perceived to comprise an underlying, stabilizing American folk culture...

...and small-town main streets devoid of people and action, their curbs lined with identical automobiles...

...Evans did make photographs of people...

...Having been a less than indifferent prep school and college student, Evans went to Paris in 1926 and for the next 25 months led a boulevard and café life while reading, among others, Huysmans, Remy de Gourmont, Cocteau, and Baudelaire...

...The most familiar Evans photographs are those included in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the book about tenant farming in the deep South, with text by James Agee...

...But there was a moral problem of a different order...

...There was no attempt to catch them unawares, in distress, or in anything but a formal stillness...

...He was Walker Evans III, born in St...

...associate editor, "American National Biography" At the time of his death last year, James Mellow had only taken his biography of Walker Evans (1903-1975) to 1956, when the photographer was halfway through a 21 -year career on the staff of Fortune magazine...

...The Great Depression—and withitmany of the immediate needs of Southern tenant farmers—and World War II had passed...

...His ambition was to stand for fact, not sympathy...

...Louis the son of a promising young advertising executive (in charge of the Aunt Jemima pancake mix campaign and, later, inventor of the slogan "Time to Re-Tire" for the Fisk tire company) and of a mother who played the piano and liked opera...

...As a lover (homosexual, heterosexual, one of a threesome), the evidence suggests that he was efficient...

...After his return in 1928, he sold his first photograph (of a New York skyscraper with a crane cutting obliquely across the vertical...

...The period he is most identified with, however, is the 1930s, and Mellow's accounts of those years, as well as his portrait of earlier personal and artistic influences in Evans' life, are detailed and illuminating...

...It ran in the same issue of Alhambra magazine as his translation of a fragment by Blaise Cendrars...

...His photographs were shot straighton, without angles, dramatizing shadows, or action...

...Thereafter, even during the years at Fortune, he was frequently urgently in need of money, reduced to cadging for meals—but he was noted for dressing beautifully in Brooks Brothers jackets and Peal shoes...

...In 1937 there was Nathan Asch's The Road: In Search of America, and in 1938 Louise Armstrong's We Too Are the People, followed in 1940 by Benjamin Appel's The People Talk...

...Throughout the 1930s Evans devoted himself to documenting America...

...He was a "diffident dandy," Mellow quotes one of his friends as saying...

...That same year Erskine Caldwell put out Some American People...

...Wilson's journey was virtually duplicated by many another writer, painter and photographer...

...In 1935 Sherwood Anderson went on the road, then published Puzzled America...

...Among the artists and writers with whom Evans associated, he was, according to all accounts, urbane, reserved and fastidious, despite the occasional irregularity of his life...

...He slept in their beds, was bitten by their lice, ate at their tables, and rifled through their bureau drawers...

...After the FSA years, he did a remarkable series in the New York City subways...

...the photographs seem to ask...

...They are chilly, anonymous and manifestly impartial...

...It would be photographs...

...The agency also boasted photographers Ben Shahn, John Vachon, Carl Mydans, and Dorothea Lange...

...Of course they did neither, just as a reading of Evans' photographs would have predicted...

...In 1935 he was hired as a staff photographer for the so-called Resettlement Administration—later the Farm Security Administration (FSA)—set up by the New Deal especially to assist tenant and other poor farmers at this low point of the Depression...

...In the summer of 1936 Agee, on assignment from Fortune magazine, and Evans, on loan from the FSA, went to Hale County, Alabama, in search of an average tenant family...

...Using a small camera hidden on his person, he caught riders as they are: exhausted, numb, blank, isolated...

...Typical subjects are interiors of stores or shacks, uninhabited or with the inhabitants treated merely as pieces of shabby furniture...

...As a result Evans' enduring distinction, even among other so-called "documentary" photographers, became his particular brand of disinterest...

...Evans' 1930s photographs (of Southern tenant farmers, of automobile junkyards in the back reaches of American towns, of peeling billboards) reflect more directly than might be supposed an education and a taste that was literary, modernist and, as Mellow indicates, Frenchinfluenced...

...If I could do it," he declared, "I'd do no writing at all here...

...outdoor advertisements (for movies, Coca-Cola, Prince Albert tobacco, and Philip Morris cigarettes...

...The family was socially ambitious and well-to-do but there was a limit, reached when Evans' father ran off with another woman and put himself to the task of supporting two families...

...But Evans insisted on his independence...

...Mellow's more detailed work suggests the same...