Walker Evans: No Politics

Le livre

Stephanie Schwartzs project studies the work of photographer Walker Evans in relation to the history of documentary, modernism, politics, and labor. Her jumping-off point is Evanss first major commission, his 1933 Cuba portfolio. Evans was sent to Cuba by the Philadelphia publishing house J.B. Lippincott to work on photographs that would accompany journalist Carleton Bealss anti-imperialist book The Crime of Cuba. The work Evans was expected to make would capture a world in a state of upheaval; the work he made, by contrast, was of people in posed and quiet states--stevedores and policemen with hats and cigars, the old and the unemployed splayed on park benches. As Schwartz puts it, Evans refused to bear witness. . . . This book is about Evanss refusal. Why hit the streets in the midst of a revolution and produce such a banal record? Why work for hire and refuse to do the work? Schwartz moves between the various projects Evans produced between the 1930s and the 1960s, as well as those he began in the 1930s and finished or remade in the 1960s. The result is a sort of intellectual history of Evans, of documentary, and of the idea of work itself