WALKER EVANS: POLAROIDS
Jeff L. Rosenheim (editor)

8 x 10 book with 186 pages and 265 color illustrations. The size of the book and the page design follow a sample page created by Evans. The images in this book, almost all of them unpublished, were selected from a total of approximately 2500 Polaroids that Evans left behind when he died in 1975.

Walker Evans needs no introduction; he stands as one of the seminal photographic figures of the 20th century, influencing generations of photographers during and after his lifetime. In 1973, the Polaroid company placed in his hands an innovative new product, the SX-70 camera, and offered him unlimited film. The immediacy and conciseness of the Polaroid images fascinated Evans, who was always searching for a means of translating his vision into reality. This beautiful little book reproduces the last images of his life.

The virtues of this camera, introduced in 1972, perfectly fit Evans's search for a concise yet poetic vision of his world: its instant prints were for the infirm seventy-year-old photographer what scissors and cut paper were for the aging Matisse.

The unique SX- 70 prints are the artist's last photographs, the culmination of half a century of work in photography. With this new camera, Evans returned to some of his key motifs-signs, posters, and their ultimate reduction, the letter itself.

Nobody should touch a Polaroid until he's over sixty, Evans once said. It was only, he implied, after years of work and struggle and experimentation, years of developing one's judgment and vision, that the instrument could be pushed to its full, revelatory potential. Using the SX-70, and leaving aside the intricacies of photographic technique, Evans stripped photography to its bare essentials: seeing and choosing.

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