Description
Book SynopsisThis sweeping reinterpretation of Walker Evans reveals how the photographer's work for hire during and after the Great Depression forces us to reconsider American documentary and its histories.
Trade Review[
Walker Evans] is a timely and insightful analysis of documentary photography through the complexities of Walker Evans’ refusal to work politically. Schwartz illuminates numerous aspects of Evans’ life and practice, including detailed studies of certain of his photobooks. In an era in which questions of representation and ‘making history’ are fundamental to our understanding of the world around us, this book is essential reading. * photo-eye, "2020 Favorite Photobooks" *
[
Walker Evans] succeeds in reconsidering the work and legacy of Evans within a vast constellation of photographers and writers. It is a rich and nuanced work for students of American photography and documentary made during the twentieth century, especially those interested in politics and material history. In a time when everything is politics, the search for apolitical action is a particularly helpful tool for interrogating our own ideas about the topic. * H-Socialisms *
[Schwartz] takes an approach that honors Evans’s own attitude toward photography: 'a mode of work in which refusing politics was the only way to work politically'...Plentiful black-and-white photographs are placed to maximize Schwartz’s argument, using Evans’s own words. Although Evans scholarship is a crowded field, Schwartz’s book offers a thoughtful perspective on a complicated artist. Recommended. * CHOICE *
Schwartz does not construct her own Walker to analyse...but focusses more directly on his work itself. In a way, she looks closely at a thick visual slice of him instead of trying to digest his complex self as a whole...Schwartz challenges the reader with detailed studies of some of [Evans'] photobooks as well as modern photography’s most canonical texts. These raise issues of representation and, more critically, how documentaries serve to create history via visual narration. * Visual Studies *
Table of Contents
- Introduction: Refusals
- Part I. American Histories
- Collaboration
- Doing Anything for Work
- Too Much Time
- Inconsolable Memories
- Part II. Late Portraits
- Taking Credit
- History Lessons
- Persons and Publics
- Nothing to See Here
- Part III. Yesterday’s News
- A Dream Job
- Tabloid Time
- American Holiday
- Domestic Screens
- Coda: Remakes
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Index
