Photography in America: Svetlana Albers on Walker Evans. Review. – culture

Certainly Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand were of great importance in the development of photography in the USA in the early twentieth century. But arguably no one has had much influence on the paparazzi who have followed (and today) like Walker Evans. One can only agree with Svetlana Albers when she writes that Evans, born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, invented America in the first place.

Stephen Shore, Gary Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, they all follow in his footsteps, as he is the one who sharpened the eye for the everyday, the ordinary and opened it primarily: to the damp streets, crooked houses, and dusty furniture you can find instantly you recognize in the pictures It is essentially American, even if there are streets, houses, and cars elsewhere in the world. Not to mention the farming families of the southern United States and the people in the New York subway that Evans photographed.

Basically, it is welcomed when a book is dedicated to Walker Evans. There aren’t a lot of good books (or articles) about photography, and so the same books are cited over and over again: those by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag.

Art historian Svetlana Albers, whose book “Walker Evans. America. Life and Art” is now available in translation by Wolfgang Kemp, makes new connections by detailing Walker Evans’ relationship with Gustave Flaubert, who previously wrote only about painting and is dedicated to Charles Baudelaire. Albers describes Evans’ photography as particularly “literary”. But it is up to Wolfgang Kemp to explain in the epilogue what she really means by that: the images are “narrative,” that is, a narrative, and they always convey a story.

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In other chapters of her book, which looks less like an autobiography than a collection of essays, Albers takes a look at Walker Evans’ stay in Cuba, his method of processing subsequent photographs, and his time in the magazine. luck and “withdrawing it inward”.

But if you want to get that far and get into the all-encompassing and excellently typed part of the image, you have to put in some effort, and that’s because of the translation. Wolfgang Kemp is an art historian and expert in photography who wrote the foreword to Albers’ book Art as Description, which was published in German in 1985. But although he was awarded the Sigmund Freud Prize for Scientific Prose in 2018, he is not a translator. Some of his German text is still stuck in the English sentence structure and terminology to the point of incomprehension.

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Walker Evans and James Agee’s “Let’s Praise Now Famous Men” is said to begin with a “flow of enthusiasm. It’s about wanting to sleep with the sister of the man they were living with.” What on earth is an impassioned faucet? The same page reads, “Agee was good with people and opened up ways for Evans with the camera.” Aside from the fact that nothing in this sentence resembles a German sentence apart from the individual words, the relation between subject and subject is also wrong. After all, Agee is the author and not the guy with the camera.

There are examples like this on every page. The quality of Alpers’ text can only be evaluated to a limited extent, but the impression prevails that someone would rather put something in dry terms than do what Walker Evans did: open your eyes and show what you see.