AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Walker Evans
Walker Evans: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988 [50th anniversary edition]. A fine hardcover book in full black cloth in a fine dust jacket: slightest trace of wear to top edge of jacket. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. 8 x 9 hardcover book with 206 pages with 87 with 87 full-page halftones. Contains an essay by Lincoln Kirstein. One of the most influential photography books ever published -- a beautiful and uncommon title.
In 1938 Walker Evans was the first photographer to have a solo exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art. Published in conjunction with that landmark show, the 87 images presented here revolutionized photography's documentary role, and the book's very design reconfigured the photo-essay into "a complex, elliptical, hugely ambitious work." From its opening sequence of a photographer's shop, American Photographs "declares itself not just a book about the world, but about photography… It constitutes a document of 1930s America so persuasive that John Szarkowski has remarked: 'It is difficult to know now with certainty whether Walker Evans recorded the America of his youth, or invented it'" (Parr & Badger I:114). With text by Lincoln Kirstein, "Evans' closest collaborator in the realization of the book" (Roth, 98).
American Photographs immediately established Evans as a major artist. "American Photographs revealed the terrible gulf between what Americans tell themselves they are and what they know they are, and at the same time opened a fissure within photography between 'artistic' and documentary practice. When Ansel Adams saw (who was born the same year as Evans, 1903) American Photographs, he wrote to Edward Weston, complaining that 'Walker Evans's book gives me a hernia. I am so goddamn mad over what people from the left tier think America is.'" (Roth, The Book of 101 Books, pp. 98-99)
"What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much?"
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
out of stock