Somebody went and printed Walker Evans's negatives big on an inkjet -- the prints are on display here in Manhattan at the UBS Art Gallery (6th and 51st). Today's New York Times publishes a review that ponders the consequences, and the nature of photography:
The New York Times, Friday, August 25, 2006
Art Review
Walker Evans. Or Is It?
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
A PHOTOGRAPHER snaps a picture. If its a camera with film, a negative is made; if its a digital camera, a file is produced. A printer, in a dark room using chemicals, or at a computer screen, can tinker with the image, crop it, enlarge it, make it lighter or darker, highlight one part or obscure another.
In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether its a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself, although if the photographer is a journalist, any hanky-panky in the printing process comes at the potential cost of the pictures integrity. Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.
I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.
For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.
For his part Evans notoriously disdained darkrooms and only haphazardly supervised the making of his own prints. But he adopted the new Polaroid SX-70 camera when it came along in 1973, indicating that he wasnt averse to new technologies; and with his negatives, like most photographers, he occasionally burned in or dodged out passages to make the pictures look more the way he wanted them to, which they couldnt otherwise. To a negative of the famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the sharp-faced Alabama tenant farmers wife, he attached instructions for exposing furrows in her brow. Adjusting the exposure was the technique he had at hand, a crude one compared to digital technology.
The new Evans prints are made by John Hill, a friend and colleague of Evanss at the Yale School of Art, in collaboration with Sven Martson, who printed photographs for Evans during the 1970s. They use carbon pigments. Evans shot these works on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, so they ended up in the Library of Congress as public property, where anybody now has permission to reproduce them.
The digital process allows Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson to uncover details embedded in the negatives, outside the tonal range of the old silver gelatin prints: a shadowy girl in the doorway of a roadside stand near Birmingham, Ala.; numbers painted on a telephone pole beside a gas station in Reedsville, W.Va.; penny-picture faces in a window of a photographers studio in Savannah, Ga. The new prints modulate and unify the midranges of grays in these pictures to soften contrasts and give a warmer ambience to photographs that were often sharp and austere in Evanss gelatin silver prints. Mr. Hill, who put together the show, includes various books, magazines and prints that Evans supervised, so you can make the comparison yourself.
But does this improve the pictures? No. For one thing, it is not possible to improve on the quality of Evanss originals, only to emulate it. For another, size shifts how we see, both for better and worse. There is a level of concentration required by staring into a small gelatin silver print, a way the image focuses the mind and stays contained within a narrow field of vision, which is among the pleasures of photography. Bigger pictures are read differently, more piecemeal, in the way that film in a theater is viewed differently from an image on television or on a computer screen. Evans lugged his large-format camera around the rural South during the heat of summer so that he could make pictures containing lots of detail. And for his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1971 he approved the installation of a few blownup photographs as props.
But a new detail revealed by an enlarged digital print becomes a visual fact that, however subtly, affects the balance of the entire picture. Photography is a seamless medium: a whole, continuous image put together at once, which the eye unconsciously distinguishes from a drawn image that is made inch by inch, or pixel by pixel, in the case of a digital image.
Maybe thats why these new prints have something of the aura of drawings. They are, Mr. Hill makes clear, his interpretations of Evanss work. The effort may summon to mind Sherrie Levines appropriations of Evanss photographs, which were also conceived as high-end art objects, not commonplace reproductions. But while Ms. Levine trumpeted the inferior, second-hand quality of her copies (which at first sold for more than Evanss vintage prints; go figure), Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson bring to their works the authority of first-hand experience with Evans and an obvious devotion to him.
And this is where the philosophical implications get interesting. Is photography closer to music and theater, or to painting? A painting is what it is, and copies of it are not the same. Music and theater exist through their variety of interpretations. Mr. Hill makes the music argument, not surprisingly.
The tricky part is that a listener knows a musician playing Bach is not Bach. Somebody looking at one of these new Evans prints is likely to assume it is by Evans, which it is of course only up to a point. That point is the threshold of the new technology.
It allows Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson to combine two separate images into a wide panorama of a street scene in Selma, Ala. The stitches are clear, acknowledging the interpretive lark. In other cases, moderate-to-large-scale prints of the Cherokee Parts Store and of Joes Auto Graveyard in Pennsylvania, of matching houses with round windows and a Carole Lombard poster on a wall in front of them, and of a small-town main street, crisscrossed by telephone wires all these prove that Evanss pictures work at any size because they are emblematic and therefore infinitely reproduceable.
He combined Hemingways economy with Cummingss wit and Eliots urbanity. His laconic scrutiny defined an American visual poetry stripped of Victorian charm and propriety and easy bohemianism. Its there in the rhyming circles of the windows of the houses echoing Lombards shiner on the poster, in the haphazard geometry of the telephone wires and in the tumble of abandoned Model Ts, like tombstones, collected at the base of a grassy hill. The last is akin to one of Bradys Civil War photographs, silent and eternal. Evanss mordant dispassion let him see destitution and the everyday in all its ready-made eloquence, short-circuiting our pity and condescension.
About that famous Allie Mae Burroughs portrait, of which there is a new, sumptuous print and also a billboard-size image in the UBS show, Lionel Trilling pointed out that she simply refuses to be an object of your social consciousness. She refuses to be an object at all.
These latest prints, beautiful though they are, will no doubt be superseded by further technological inventions claiming to extract still more signs of the artists genius.
They will come and go. Technology isnt timeless. Evans is.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
The New York Times, Friday, August 25, 2006
Art Review
Walker Evans. Or Is It?
By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
A PHOTOGRAPHER snaps a picture. If its a camera with film, a negative is made; if its a digital camera, a file is produced. A printer, in a dark room using chemicals, or at a computer screen, can tinker with the image, crop it, enlarge it, make it lighter or darker, highlight one part or obscure another.
In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether its a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself, although if the photographer is a journalist, any hanky-panky in the printing process comes at the potential cost of the pictures integrity. Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.
I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.
For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.
For his part Evans notoriously disdained darkrooms and only haphazardly supervised the making of his own prints. But he adopted the new Polaroid SX-70 camera when it came along in 1973, indicating that he wasnt averse to new technologies; and with his negatives, like most photographers, he occasionally burned in or dodged out passages to make the pictures look more the way he wanted them to, which they couldnt otherwise. To a negative of the famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the sharp-faced Alabama tenant farmers wife, he attached instructions for exposing furrows in her brow. Adjusting the exposure was the technique he had at hand, a crude one compared to digital technology.
The new Evans prints are made by John Hill, a friend and colleague of Evanss at the Yale School of Art, in collaboration with Sven Martson, who printed photographs for Evans during the 1970s. They use carbon pigments. Evans shot these works on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, so they ended up in the Library of Congress as public property, where anybody now has permission to reproduce them.
The digital process allows Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson to uncover details embedded in the negatives, outside the tonal range of the old silver gelatin prints: a shadowy girl in the doorway of a roadside stand near Birmingham, Ala.; numbers painted on a telephone pole beside a gas station in Reedsville, W.Va.; penny-picture faces in a window of a photographers studio in Savannah, Ga. The new prints modulate and unify the midranges of grays in these pictures to soften contrasts and give a warmer ambience to photographs that were often sharp and austere in Evanss gelatin silver prints. Mr. Hill, who put together the show, includes various books, magazines and prints that Evans supervised, so you can make the comparison yourself.
But does this improve the pictures? No. For one thing, it is not possible to improve on the quality of Evanss originals, only to emulate it. For another, size shifts how we see, both for better and worse. There is a level of concentration required by staring into a small gelatin silver print, a way the image focuses the mind and stays contained within a narrow field of vision, which is among the pleasures of photography. Bigger pictures are read differently, more piecemeal, in the way that film in a theater is viewed differently from an image on television or on a computer screen. Evans lugged his large-format camera around the rural South during the heat of summer so that he could make pictures containing lots of detail. And for his Museum of Modern Art retrospective in 1971 he approved the installation of a few blownup photographs as props.
But a new detail revealed by an enlarged digital print becomes a visual fact that, however subtly, affects the balance of the entire picture. Photography is a seamless medium: a whole, continuous image put together at once, which the eye unconsciously distinguishes from a drawn image that is made inch by inch, or pixel by pixel, in the case of a digital image.
Maybe thats why these new prints have something of the aura of drawings. They are, Mr. Hill makes clear, his interpretations of Evanss work. The effort may summon to mind Sherrie Levines appropriations of Evanss photographs, which were also conceived as high-end art objects, not commonplace reproductions. But while Ms. Levine trumpeted the inferior, second-hand quality of her copies (which at first sold for more than Evanss vintage prints; go figure), Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson bring to their works the authority of first-hand experience with Evans and an obvious devotion to him.
And this is where the philosophical implications get interesting. Is photography closer to music and theater, or to painting? A painting is what it is, and copies of it are not the same. Music and theater exist through their variety of interpretations. Mr. Hill makes the music argument, not surprisingly.
The tricky part is that a listener knows a musician playing Bach is not Bach. Somebody looking at one of these new Evans prints is likely to assume it is by Evans, which it is of course only up to a point. That point is the threshold of the new technology.
It allows Mr. Hill and Mr. Martson to combine two separate images into a wide panorama of a street scene in Selma, Ala. The stitches are clear, acknowledging the interpretive lark. In other cases, moderate-to-large-scale prints of the Cherokee Parts Store and of Joes Auto Graveyard in Pennsylvania, of matching houses with round windows and a Carole Lombard poster on a wall in front of them, and of a small-town main street, crisscrossed by telephone wires all these prove that Evanss pictures work at any size because they are emblematic and therefore infinitely reproduceable.
He combined Hemingways economy with Cummingss wit and Eliots urbanity. His laconic scrutiny defined an American visual poetry stripped of Victorian charm and propriety and easy bohemianism. Its there in the rhyming circles of the windows of the houses echoing Lombards shiner on the poster, in the haphazard geometry of the telephone wires and in the tumble of abandoned Model Ts, like tombstones, collected at the base of a grassy hill. The last is akin to one of Bradys Civil War photographs, silent and eternal. Evanss mordant dispassion let him see destitution and the everyday in all its ready-made eloquence, short-circuiting our pity and condescension.
About that famous Allie Mae Burroughs portrait, of which there is a new, sumptuous print and also a billboard-size image in the UBS show, Lionel Trilling pointed out that she simply refuses to be an object of your social consciousness. She refuses to be an object at all.
These latest prints, beautiful though they are, will no doubt be superseded by further technological inventions claiming to extract still more signs of the artists genius.
They will come and go. Technology isnt timeless. Evans is.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
