Walker Evans Emulation
For our final project in Digital Photography this semester, I have chosen to emulate the famous photographer Walker Evans who photographed the working-class life of America during the Great Depression. Some of his most well-known photographs were first published in a book titled, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” which was co-created by writer James Agee. These photos were from his 1936 trip down South to document the lives of tenant farmers in Alabama and remains to be a personal record of a group of poor, white, deprived individuals struggling to survive. Evans was a documentary photographer, who chose to be cool and detached from the images he was capturing; a brilliant observer who’s photos sought to capture the truth about America during his time. He had a desire to catalog a time and place to be remembered upon for future generations. His camera recorded the absolute dry reality of sorrow and emptiness in the life of cotton farmers during the Great Depression. This can clearly be seen in his portrait photographs, as the gaze in the eyes of his subjects shows a cycle of endless work and exhaustion. They strike a sense of emotions within the viewer, who look upon their dirty clothes, faces, hands, and feet and come to understand their sense of hopelessness and sadness. The many faces he photographed reveal no sense of happiness; no impression of a slight smile. Many of the images he captured in this series of work are posed, yet they appear candid and honest. They are printed in black and white and are often centered to the middle of the frame. Evans was also obsessed with light, often waiting for the perfect time to take his pictures. This focus on light sets his photos apart from others, displaying a new and unique quality. Although Evans left the South after a summer of documentation and went on to take more pictures of people and places, I am inspired by this series of work in particular. His style captured a sense of feeling and emotion without romanticizing or overexaggerating. To emulate Evans, I have chosen to capture images within the same ideals, but instead to reveal the struggles and turmoil of college life. I have chosen to focus on college students, especially during the week of finals when everyone has been through the same (yet very much different) cycle of work, debt, exhaustion, and more work. As I have talked to my fellow peers, there is a sense that we have lost a portion of our motivation to work, but we must struggle through these feelings in order to “survive” and graduate. Although we have a much more privileged existence than the laboring tenant farmers that Evans took pictures of, I think we can relate to some of the sadness they felt. There is a certain despair in not knowing what the future holds, and I want to emulate this sense of anxiety in my pictures. I also plan to print in black and white and will attempt to find the right lighting in my photographs. Finally, I want to try to pose my subjects in their everyday life, but with a candid sense of honesty as Evans so elegantly did. Evans changed the way we see America, and I want to change the way we see college life.
Works Cited
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men - Revisited -.” Bell, Carol, director. The American Experience,
season 1, episode 9, PBS, 29 Nov. 1988.
Mellow, James R. Walker Evans. Perseus, 2002.
Papageorge, Tod. Walker Evans and Robert Frank: an Essay on Influence. Yale University Art
Gallery, 1981.
Szarkowski, John. “Walker Evans American Photographer.” Encyclopædia Britannica,
Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 30 Oct. 2018.
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