Cold Comfort: Maggie Anderson's poems on the photography of Walker Evans

I keep coming back to the photographs of Walker Evans: Appalachia and the South, farms and farmers, steel mills, graveyards, signs, churches, small towns and main streets, living rooms and porches, New York City street scenes and subway riders. These are the same iconic subjects recurrent in my own writing. Well, not the New York City subway and street scenes. Except for a long ago train trip from Chicago to Boston that involved changing trains there, New York City is outside my experience. All I really know of it is what I’ve seen in photographs and movies and books.

In last week’s post, I mentioned Philip Gefter’s essay “Icons as Fact, Fiction and Metaphor” which explores the truthfulness of photographs. I’ve never questioned the truthfulness of Evans’ photographs or that they are purely documentary. In fact, a common criticism of Evans’ work is that it’s too clinical. However, in reading James R. Mellow’s biography Walker Evans, I came across some information about Evans’ approach to his subjects that made me uncomfortable. Walker Evans sometimes went to elaborate lengths to conceal his photographic intent.

For his New York City subway series, Evans used a concealed camera strapped on under his overcoat with the lens poking out between the front buttons and a cable release threaded down the sleeve to trip the shutter. He was also fond of using an angled viewfinder which enabled him to photograph someone who was standing on the periphery. While it appeared to onlookers that Evans was photographing something in front of him, he was actually shooting in a different direction off to the side. To further his ruse, he often had a companion pretend to pose in front of the camera for the picture he wasn’t taking. I’m not quite sure why this bothers me since it ostensibly allowed him to document what was happening without altering or interfering with the scene – which is the key element of true documentary photography. As Gefter wrote, “As a witness to events, the photojournalist sets out to chronicle what happens in the world as it actually occurs. A cardinal rule of the profession is that the presence of the camera must not alter the situation being photographed.”

I’m beginning to question whether Evans’ camera actually did alter the scene. It’s the eyes of his subjects that unsettle me – their curiosity, the questioning stares. Were these people standing on the sidelines? Were they caught up in watching him at work, not realizing they were his subjects? Did the presence of the camera attract their attention, creating an odd twist to the observer vs. the observed?

In the summer of 1935, Evans spent several months photographing in West Virginia and Pennsylvania when he was one of the photographers working on the Farm Security Administration (FSA) project under Roy Stryker. Poet Maggie Anderson’s family was from Rowlesburg, WV, which is one of the towns Evans photographed. Anderson wrote a series of poems about Walker Evans and his West Virginia photographs, included in her 1986 poetry collection, Cold Comfort, which was published fifty years after Evans’ photographs.

Maggie Anderson was born in New York City where her parents worked as teachers, and every summer they traveled to West Virginia – home. In a wonderful interview with Kate Long for the radio series “In Their Own Country,” Anderson described these trips to West Virginia and how she felt freer in Rowlesburg where there were more outdoor places for a child to play than in New York City, and where she was surrounded by cousins and extended family. In response to a question in Kate Long’s interview about whether she “has it in for Walker Evans,” Anderson said, “I guess I sort of do have it in for him” but later goes on to say “he’s a wonderful photographer.” Maggie explained that there was something about Evans’ stance that made her feel protective of the people he photographed, and that Evans “couldn’t know them the way I did.” She emphasized that she wasn’t saying he didn’t have a right to make the photographs – just that he couldn’t possibly see or know those people as she does.

When asked if she’d like to look at and discuss some photographs for this blog article, Maggie respectfully declined, saying she preferred to let the poems speak for themselves and that she feels she’s said all she has to say about Evans’ photographs. I can certainly understand wanting to let the work speak for itself. They are strong and beautiful poems, the language as visual as any photograph, so that readers form their own idea of how the photograph looks.

My own feelings are somewhat mixed since I’ve stood on both sides of the camera, and for all I know I’ve been captured standing off to the side unaware as well. I understand a photographer wanting to document what he or she sees, and there could be an argument made that the angled viewfinder allowed Evans to make a purely documentary image. I see nothing wrong with shooting from the hip in a public place. It’s the elaborate subterfuge Evans employed that bothers me, and I’m not sure that the resulting images weren’t influenced by the presence of the camera in a different way. In some cases it may be that the intent and curious expressions on the faces of his subjects are because they are watching the photographer with interest, thinking they are watching him take a photograph of someone or something else.

If the people and places Evans had photographed were of my own family and home, I would feel protective of them too. But, there’s just enough distance for me to appreciate Evans’ photographs because they are of another place, of other people – even though those people are very much like the people and place where I come from. Distance equals comfort. And Evans pierced the comfort zone of the people in the West Virginia towns of Rowlesburg, Terra Alta, Morgantown, and Reedsville.

For me, it’s an interesting juxtaposition of work by two artists I admire. Walker Evans’ photographs show the outer experience, a limitation of the photographic art form by its nature. Maggie Anderson’s poetry peels back the exterior to reveal the emotional interior of personal territory in a way that language does best. While I still regard Evans’ photographs with great admiration, Anderson’s poetry alters the distance with which I now view them.

Photo Credits:

Top: “Main Street, Morgantown, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-34376.

Bottom: “Independence Day, Terra Alta, West Virginia” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF3301-009002-M1.

Walker Evans: The Language of the Image

I just finished reading Walker Evans, a biography of the photographer by James R. Mellow. I’ve always admired Evans’ photographs, but hadn’t known that he’d first wanted to become a writer and had tried writing short stories before turning his passion to photography. Evans believed in the photograph as story, and Mellow quotes him as saying, “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”

Evans had a way of selecting and including details that told the viewer much within a single image. Some of his most famous images did not include people, but rather the objects they possessed. At first glance those images appear to be only of vacant rooms, but as your eye scans the frame much is revealed about the people who live there. Mellow observes that, “his photographs appear to be taken with a novelist’s eye” and the objects Evans chose to show us “define character and circumstances, time and place.”

While Evans supported himself with commercial work, most notably on staff at Fortune magazine, most of his work was documentary in style. He spent several years in the late 1930s and early 1940s photographing around the United States, particularly in Appalachia and the South, as one of the photographers working on a project supervised by Roy Stryker for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He also worked with writer James Agee on the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a study of sharecropper families in the South.

I cannot look at Evans’ photographs of the tenant farmer families without thinking of my own paternal grandfather who lost his farm during the Great Depression. My grandfather was able to move his family to a farm in central Pennsylvania, where he worked the rest of his life as a tenant farmer for a landowner who operated several farms. My dad and his siblings spent most of their youth working on that farm, but in circumstances far better than that of the sharecropper families in Evans and Agee’s book. What strikes me about the portraits of the tenant farmers in Evans’ photographs is their stoic dignity in the face of tremendous hardship. Agee described Evans’ photographs as “the cruel radiance of what is.”

Evans and Agee considered their work to be an equal collaboration, with neither the words nor the images holding importance over the other. Mellow described this collaboration as a “dialogue” between the words and images. In the preface to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee wrote: “The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative.”

Evans described his work as an attempt to capture “the American vernacular.” Recurring themes in his photographs include small towns and main streets, farms and farming families, steel mills, graveyards, and signs. In New York City, where he resided, he photographed urban street scenes and did a series on subway riders. “The American vernacular” seems to best describe this body of work, the phrase implying a melding of image and words. Evans photographs speak to us, and they tell us about ourselves.

Photograph credit: “Washstand in the dog run and kitchen of Floyd Burroughs’ cabin. Hale County, Alabama” by Walker Evans. FSA, Library of Congress, LC-USF342-008133.

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Updates and News

• A big thank you to Diana Nelson Jones of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette for showcasing last week’s “Hillside Houses” as a guest post titled “Unexpected Beauty” on her City Walkabout blog at the Post-Gazette online. I’ve added City Walkabout to my list of favorite blogs and websites on the sidebar at the right of the screen. Check it out.

• Readers have been asking that I open the comments section, so I’m going to give that a try to see how it goes (since comments will be moderated, there will most likely be a delay before your comment can be posted). For those who want to contact me privately, there is an e-mail address on the sidebar where I can be reached.

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NOTE: There have been some technical difficulties with opening up the comments feature today. Hopefully this feature will be in operation soon.