Art: Recorded Time

The theorem that “the camera cannot lie” is one banality which no self-respect-ing photographer ever repeats. Unless a camera is skilfully used it can produce mechanical lies on the negative, and in many kinds of light or shadow even expert photographers do not yet know how to reproduce what they see. Under the best technical circumstances, moreover, a photograph tells precisely that fraction of truth allowed by the camera’s brief interval of exposure and limited field of vision. This fraction may be very slight or very great, depending on the photographer’s luck, care and awareness. To know where and when good shots can be made takes intelligence and a wakeful eye. To register them with the camera requires talent.

There are perhaps half-a-dozen living photographers who are seriously and solely engaged in making the camera tell what concentrated truth they can find for it. One. the oldest, is Alfred Stieglitz. Another is a Hungarian war photographer, Robert Capa (TIME, Feb. 24), now in China. A third, one of the most adventurous, is a 29-year-old vagabond Frenchman named Cartier-Bresson, whose abilities sober critics have called “magical.” Apparently carefree but quick on the trigger, Cartier-Bresson has snapped unforgettable, revelatory pictures of commonplace and sub-commonplace scenes, from bare French cafe tables to Mexicans with their pants down. Closest to him among U. S. photographers is a 35-year-old ex-St. Louisan with an inquiring nose and an unobtrusive but exacting eye. Walker Evans began with simple equipment ten years ago, mostly influenced by Matthew Brady’s Civil War photographs and by the movies of Von Stroheim and Vertov. This week Manhattan’s Museum of Modern Art published American Photographs, a book of 87 pictures by Evans, and honored him with its first one-man show of photography.

Compared with such recent books of documentary photographs as Archibald MacLeish’s Land of the Free (TIME, April 25), Evans’ selection in his own book is many-sided, disinterested, clinical. The photographs are uncaptioned yet arranged to be looked at in order. In each the camera has caught the essential moment, memorized in detail some significant things: the early morning light on hundreds of back yards in an industrial city; four sour people on a Bronx bench on Sunday; a pompous Legionnaire with waxed mustaches, looking brave.

“The power of Evans’ work,” says Critic Lincoln Kirstein in an excited but penetrating commentary, “lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets.” Photographer Evans himself likes some of his pictures because of their designed humor, others for a quality of care and sensitiveness poorly known as “poetry.” Evans’ ruined Southern mansion, for example, is no ordinary Southern mansion but one of exceptional, weathered, Doric dignity. A huge dead tree is fallen, uprooted, in front of it. Full silvery sunlight etches the tree, its roots and the moss plumes hanging from an upright branch. In the sky there is only one cloud, feathery like the moss.

No less careful and scarcely less packed with historical truth is Evans’ treatment of The Automobile: a junk yard of jalopies and car bodies at the foot of a beautiful country slope (see cut); a boy and girl, date 1932, in a second-hand roadster at a small-town curb.

For journalistic photographers, the ostensible recorders of their time, publication of this solitary uncommercial work provided a high standard and a lesson. The lesson: photographs “for the record” may well be trash unless taken with an artist’s selective eye, a thinker’s grasp of meanings. Because documentary work is now widely recognized as the native province and most promising form of photography, supplanting the slick pictorial school long dominated by Edward Steichen, Walker Evans’ show and book this week appeared to be the most significant event for the photographic art since Steichen went out of business.