Art: Puritan Explorer

“Photography,” says Walker Evans, “has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘Art’. But,” he adds quietly, “it’s an art for all that.” Visitors to Evans’ retrospective exhibition at Chicago’s Art Institute last week were sure to see his point. Evans’ own undeniably artful photographs seemed worlds apart from the museum’s paintings. They were almost head-on views of junkyards, stray people, tenements, hill farms and city streets, done with an antiseptic brilliance of black, white and grey. Chill as glass, they had no more charm than a newsreel, but the quiet clarity of each print gave their commonplace subject matter the impact and beauty of things seen for the first time.

Evans began as a painter, 40 years ago in Chicago. “I was only four then,” he explains. “Too young for photography. And as a matter of fact I still paint once in a while. There’s a sensuous gratification in handling the tools. Cameras, on the other hand, are cold machinery, developing chemicals smell bad, and the darkroom is torture.”

For Evans, the pleasure and the art of photography are in the seeing, not the doing. He has explored the face of the U.S. for Government projects, for FORTUNE, and to illustrate books (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), photographing its muck and loveliness, miseries and grandeur, all with the same puritanical detachment. His pictures have no tricks in them, only an intensity of understatement which makes him one of the top half-dozen photographers alive. Says he: “After 20-odd years of work I still have great difficulty maintaining enough calm to operate well, at moments when some sort of perfection is in sight.”

Evans is a wry, shy little man with an air of worried thoughtfulness. He is courtly and attentive to critical opinions he doesn’t share, but unyielding about his own. There is nothing wry, shy or self-conscious about his approach to photography. He looks for “sorts of perfection” everywhere around him, and finds them by an unconscious process of recognition. “I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time,” he says with a puzzled squint, “until I discovered I didn’t need to. If the thing is there, why, there it is.”