wnyc:
Above: Shack and Ice Machine, Old Lyme, Connecticut, April 1973. Photograph by Walker Evans
Below: Excerpt from a 1974 interview with photographer Walker Evans. Source: ASX
“The thing itself is such a secret and so unapproachable”
Q: One reason for your appeal is that you have always been a photographer of extraordinary honesty and simplicity—that what you’ve been looking for in America is something unadorned and plain and true.
WALKER EVANS: You must remember that this is an unconscious phenomenon, and it is to me an amazing accident of art history and psychological history and American history that I was unconsciously working in terms that surfaced, so to speak, in your generation. You talk about simplicity. When I first made photographs, they were too plain to be considered art and I wasn’t considered an artist. I didn’t get any attention at all. The people who looked at my work thought, well, that’s just a snapshot of the backyard. Privately I knew otherwise and through stubbornness stayed with it. I think I knew what I was doing but I didn’t know that I was bringing into play these characteristics you’re talking about. You talk about honesty. I didn’t know I was honest—I was just doing that instinctively. It just so happens that in a university the habit of mind is reflective and analytical, but that’s exceptional. The so-called man in the street, if he exists, is neither reflective nor analytical.
Q: When you take pictures some kind of change occurs. There’s something different between your photographs and if you went to that place and looked at it with the naked eye, and I was wondering — you must have reflected on this, just having taken all those photographs — what effect your mind has when you make the conscious decision to push the button.
W.E.: Indeed I have. I think it’s fascinating, but it’s insoluble also. But I’d venture, if I could do it in a humble way, to claim to be an artist, and the motivation of artists is a great mystery. Who knows why a paragraph by Tolstoy is an inspired and often an almost deathless thing. It’s a piece of literature and high art, and a New York Times editorial never is. It couldn’t be. Yet they’re both uses of language.
Q: Do you think it’s possible for the camera to lie?
W.E.: It certainly is. It almost always does.
Q: Is it all right for the camera to lie?
W.E.: No, I don’t think it’s all right for any thing or any body to lie. But it’s beyond control. I just feel that honesty exists relatively in people here and there.
Q: I guess what I’m trying to ask is, if you take a beautiful photograph of a garbage can, is it lying?
W.E. – Well, somebody wrote a whole essay called “There’s No Such Thing as Beauty.” And that’s worth thinking about. A garbage can, occasionally, to me at least, can be beautiful. That’s because you’re seeing. Some people are able to see that—see it and feel it. I lean toward the enchantment, the visual power, of the esthetically rejected subject.
“The thing itself is such a secret and so unapproachable”
Nov. 26, 1974: Fulton Street off Church Street in Manhattan on a 30-degree day with wind speeds reaching 43 miles an hour. The photo ran with the headline, “Gusty Decision: Hold On or Let Fly.” Photo: Eddie Hausner/The New York Times
cannot get enough of these.
June 20, 1965: “Young fans holding aloft bats they were given by the Yankees yesterday at the stadium,” read a caption the day after the team lost a double-header to the Minnesota Twins. The crowd, numbering 72,244, was the largest in four years, provoking the organist to serenade fans with the tune “We’re in the Money.” Photo: Ernie Sisto/The New York Times
© Charles “Teenie” Harris, 1930s-1940s, One Shot Teenie
#1: Two young women eating caramel apples, 1940-1945
#2: A woman outside Kay’s Valet Shoppe, 1938-1945
#3: Boys (possibly from Herron Hill School) playing brass instruments, 1938-1945
#4: A woman poses with a car on Mulford Street in Homewood, 1937In the days of film, especially in a controlled setting, photographers often made redundant shots to make sure they captured what they wanted. Not Charles “Teenie” Harris. A native of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, the city’s cultural center of African-American life, Harris was a semi-pro athlete and a numbers runner before he bought his first camera in the 1930s. He opened a photography studio and specialized in glamour portraits, earning the nickname “One Shot” because he rarely made his subjects sit for a second take. (read more)
Nearly 80 years later, a retrospective of the photographer’s work, “Teenie Harris, Photographer: An American Story” is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh until April 7, 2012.
(via floooozie)
