Photographs etc. - Nick Lloyd Home Page

Holding

2012-01-14T15:47:00.002Z

Central London

The Safety check

2012-01-14T14:29:00.003Z

Reactor check, Hinkley Point, Somerset

Expression

2012-01-14T14:23:00.003Z

Fencing, Barnet, London

Subway protest

2012-01-14T14:14:00.001Z

Embankment underpass, London

The Protection Suit

2012-01-14T13:22:00.006Z

Protection suit, Hinkley Point nuclear power station, Somerset

Bored by History

2012-01-14T13:20:00.004Z

British Museum, London

Masks

2012-01-12T18:06:00.003Z

Masks, Fancy Dress Shop, East Finchley (c.1989)

New Year Blossom

2012-01-03T17:34:00.005Z

Blossom, Bridport, Dorset

Talking about Walker Evans (Charlie Rose & Jeff Rosenheim)

2012-01-03T08:18:00.022Z

Ansel Adams interview (1983 Master Photographers series)

2011-12-26T18:19:00.008Z

Bill Brandt interview (1983 Master Photographers series)

2011-12-26T18:03:00.005Z

Xmas greetings (North Finchley style)

2011-12-21T16:30:00.004Z

What Film Photography Still Has to Offer (CNN)

2011-12-20T21:21:00.007Z

A Dragon in Chinatown

2011-12-10T08:32:00.004Z

London Chinatown - New Year Celebrations. 1988

Paul Caponigro - and why he matters

2011-11-29T19:47:00.009Z

Thanks to Beatrice Dina on Youtube. A short video featuring Paul Caponigro talking about his work.

The video captures a lot of what I remember of Paul, including his attachment to music as a way of enriching his work/life. Should be required viewing for photographers who like to talk a great picture. Instead of making one.

P.S. I remember after the event referred to in my previous post, after Martin Parr had finished his slide presentation of what was then new colour work from the New Brighton project (and left) Paul Caponigro made a very telling comment in passing.
"Robert Frank allowed his subjects to retain their dignity."
He didn't criticize Parr's work directly. He didn't need to. He'd made a very telling observation that showed both his thorough understanding of the personal approach to photography pioneered by Frank but also an innate understanding of the humanity that was evident in much of Frank's work. But that seemed so absent in the newer photographer's work.

Paul Caponigro is one class act!

Martin Parr & Photography workshops

2011-11-28T17:26:00.004Z

After finishing University in the 1980's, I was briefly part of the independent photography workshop 'scene' - based around Peter Goldfield's Photographers at Duckspool programme.
I met quite a few photographers, including Martin Parr, who I actually met twice. Once informally as part of a 'wake' for Ray Moore, which was also attended by Paul Caponigro, Jem Southam and Mark Haworth-Booth. The second time I was one of a number of photographers on a residential weekend workshop lead by Parr.

I've been scanning my negatives and found several sheets taken during these sessions, including this one - taken in Devon at a seaside town. Possibly Seaton.

Check out the figure with the camera bag in the centre of the frame. That's Martin Parr's back circa 1988.

Woman and ice cream sign - Devon, 1988

Raymond Moore - TV documentary special

2011-11-26T22:16:00.005Z

Shown below is a rare glimpse of the life and work one of the UK's best kept photgraphy secrets, Raymond Moore.

I was due to meet Ray on a workshop at Duckspool in Somerset in the late 1980's. Sadly he passed away just days before the workshop was due to begin.

Ray Moore Part 1 (Coast to Coast TV Special)

Ray Moore Part 2 (Coast to Coast TV Special)

Ray Moore Part 3 (Coast to Coast TV Special)

Hear and See Walker Evans on film

2011-11-25T10:33:00.011Z

Walker Evans In His Own Words. Film & video from the J Paul Getty Museum.

Features Evans talking about his work during the Depression, his collaboration with the author James Agee, and his pursuit of a "bull's-eye" photograph.

HAS THE REAL PLAYER WINDOW CRASHED? Click here for the J Paul Getty Museum video page.

The Getty Museum has more resoures on Evans. Photographs are here and a brief biography is here.

Charlie Rose: A Conversation with Henri Cartier Bresson (video)

2011-11-24T23:10:00.009Z

Serious Play: The Worlds of Helen Levitt (video)

2011-11-24T22:55:00.004Z

Serious Play: The Worlds of Helen Levitt from Tanya Sleiman on Vimeo.

An extract from Vimeo of a documentary film (in progress) on Helen Levitt produced & directed by Tanya Sleiman.

Robert Frank interview by Peter Burchett

2011-11-24T22:46:00.002Z

Robert Frank from peter burchett on Vimeo.

Time Capsule' - NY Times excerpt from Louis Faurer's short film on Times Square.

2011-11-17T22:48:00.007Z

For more information on Louis Faurer from the New York Times including audio commentary on this video (click here)

Cab-driving shutterbug chronicles Istanbul's underbelly (CNN video)

2011-11-17T22:35:00.002Z

The shock of the real!

2011-09-25T08:58:00.036+01:00

I've attached at the bottom of this post, a great short documentary on the work of 2 hyper-realist sculptors, John De Andrea (whose work I haven't seen in the 'flesh') and Duane Hanson (whose work I have.)

Hanson's work, reminds me in particular of the visual and emotional 'charge' I get from the very best realist photography. Paul Strand's photograph 'Blind Woman' (below) is a good example of what I mean.

'Blind Woman' (1916)
The label she is wearing and the disfiguration of her eyes are constant reminders of her blindness. You want to look away. To not have to look but Paul Strand already has looked. You can now see what he saw and what she can't.

It seems wrong to want to look but the photograph is there as evidence and can't be undone.

It may seem cruel. To want to look. To make art out of someone else's life. Particularly someone who can't protest and was in all regards defenceless and not aware of what had just taken place.

And yet. The power of what he saw. Of being able to look and understand what he saw is there permanently.

I feel the same way about Duane Hanson's sculptures. To be able to walk so close to sculptures of people who are casts (replicas) of 'real people' carries the same guilty charge. But here, because they are in 3 dimensions, the effect on perception is dramatic.

And personal. To be able to look and stare and examine another human being at close proximity. But with no chance, no possibility of your stare being returned or your gaze confronted.

Just like Paul Strand's 'Blind Woman' the experience of looking so closely and inimately at art that mirrors so closely our own sense of reality and mortality can be an uncomfortable but worthwhile experience.

Enjoy the video. And if you can, go and see the sculptures for yourself.

William Albert Allard - The West

2011-09-22T20:30:00.020+01:00

One of my favourite photojournalists is William Albert Allard, whose work I first came across in the pages of National Geographic.

His use of colour and dynamic compositions are really quite unusual in the world of photojournalism. His work closes the gap that often seems to exist, god knows why, between so called 'art' photography and documentary photography.

From my favourite photo essay of his, here are 2 photographs from the 'Out West' series.

Henry Gray, rancher, Arizona, 1970

Stan Kendall, Nevada 1979

Man with Bandage - Fred Herzog

2011-09-21T21:57:00.007+01:00

Vivian Maier - Chicago and New York

2011-09-21T21:47:00.003+01:00

Charles Harbutt - The Face of the City

2011-09-21T08:32:00.051+01:00

Recently, I've been scanning black and white negatives taken during my student days at Portsmouth. And looking through pictures taken nearly 30 years ago, many of which were never printed or shown at the time, I'm struck by how accurately the photographs reflect the city as it then was.

Portsmouth, was (and still is) home to a large naval base, and so was very heavily bombed by Germany during the Second World War. As a consequence of this brutal bombing campaign, the city when I was living there, still bore some physical scars nearly 40 years later.
As an example, at the back of the flat in Buckland I shared briefly with the painter Steve Nesbitt, shallow bomb craters were still clearly visible.

By the time I lived there (1982-1985) the city had been largely rebuilt. But most of the building projects, especially those completed during the 1960's and 1970's had created a legacy of ugly and undistinguished buildings including the infamous (but now demolished) Tricorn Centre.

What strikes me over a quarter of a century later, after looking at my Portsmouth photographs, are similarities in mood with images taken by the photographer Charles Harbutt.

Harbutts images, the city images in particular, evoke a very cool quite abstract relationship between man and landscape. I'll post my own pictures here soon as a comparison.

Aaron Siskind and Franz Kline

2011-09-20T08:25:00.006+01:00

Photograph by Aaron Siskind

Painting by Franz Kline

Why Gene Colan Was A Master

2011-09-19T20:36:00.028+01:00

For a better understanding of why Gene Colan's art will be so sorely missed, consider the pencil drawings below.

Drawn for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer anthology series for Dark Horse comics, Gene was in his 70's when he drew these pages.

With limited vision in the later years of his life, Gene was still able to instill his drawings with a unique sense of mystery, mood and matchless artistry.

His best work (and there was much of it) was full of detail, drama and grace and infused throughout with his own special sensibility.

Nobody could match his incredible accomplishments.

Click the thumbnails for larger scans and to find out why (for yourself) Gene Colan was a Master.

Gene Colan - The Great

2011-09-18T22:15:00.015+01:00

It's not just about photography. One of my other great passions is comics. And one of the great masters. An artist who really mattered in that world was Gene Colan who died in June.
Here is Gene surrounded by some of the characters who were associated with some of his best work. Dracula and Dr. Strange.
Anyone who thinks comics are just for kids, should read Gene's long run on Dracula alongside writer Marv Wolfman. Comics for a literate audience. Comics as popular art!

Andre Kertesz and William Eggleston

2011-09-18T07:58:00.004+01:00

Photograph by Andre Kertesz

Photograph by William Eggleston

William Eggleston and Ralph Goings

2011-09-17T21:00:00.013+01:00

Photograph by William Eggleston

Painting by Ralph Goings

Stephen Shore & Richard Estes

2011-09-17T08:24:00.006+01:00

Painting by Richard Estes

Photograph by Stephen Shore

The changing face of Henri

2011-09-12T16:22:00.011+01:00

Just to prove I'm not anti-European (I'm British born so that's a bit difficult to pull off!) here are some pictures of the late, but ever so elusive master photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

Garry Winogrand - Colour Photographs

2011-09-11T17:52:00.014+01:00

I don't give a !*@$ about gasoline stations (another Garry Winogrand interview)

2011-09-11T17:43:00.019+01:00

Garry Winogrand spent two days in Rochester, New York, in October 1970.

Winogrand, showed slides of his latest work and answered questions from students.

(The original interview was conducted by Dennis Longwell. More info on the original publication here)

Contents courtesy 2point8. A great source of original research on photography.

----------------------------------------

Rochester Institute of Technology, October 9, 1970

Q: I saw a photograph that---there's a photograph that had "Kodak" and there's a kid holding a dog---

Winogrand: Yeah.

Q: ---and the people kind of wandering in and out. Now, it might be due to my own ignorance or something, but could you give me like a straight answer as to what you're trying to say in that photograph?

Winogrand: I have nothing to say.

Q: Nothing to say? Then why do you print it?

Winogrand: I don't have anything to say in any picture.

Q: Why do you print it if it has no meaning?

Winogrand: With that picture---ah, I'm interested in the space and maybe I can learn something about photography. That's what I get from photographs; if I'm lucky, I can learn something.

Q: Then you're trying to reveal something about that space?

Winogrand: I'm not revealing anything.

Q: Then what do you think is the purpose of the photograph if you're not revealing anything.

Winogrand: My education.

Q: Then what's the purpose of that? That's what I'm trying to find out.

Winogrand: That's the answer. That's really the answer....

Q: Yesterday at R.I.T. somebody asked you what are you trying to say in a certain picture and you said you weren't trying to say anything. He jumped to the conclusion that it was meaningless, and if it was meaningless, why did you bother to print it, and they seemed very confused about this.
Could you tell me what---I think I know what you're saying and I like it but I---

Winogrand: Tell me.

Q: I can't tell you, but if you'd do it again I might get a closer idea.

Winogrand: My only interest in photographing is photography. That's really the answer.

Q: In other words it isn't social comment, it isn't aah---

Winogrand: When you photograph---there's [sic] things in a photograph, right?

Q: Yeah

Winogrand: So this can't help but be a document or whatever you want to call it. It's automatic. I mean if you photograph a cake of soap, in the package or out of it, it goes without saying---

Q: But that's not what you're concerned about. I mean, your concern is photography.

Winogrand: That's it. And I have to photograph where I am.

Q: If you were somewhere else-- if for some reason you went to Arizona or Alaska, would you photograph---

Winogrand: Then that's what the pictures would look like, whatever those places look like.

Q: Is your choice of subject matter just limited by where you are, by the fact that you live in New York.

Winogrand: Yeah. But you return to certain things, though, which have more to do than just with place. Like you've got a thing about dogs no matter where they are.

Winogrand: Dogs are everyplace.

Q: You've got a thing about, say, personal injury.

Winogrand: That has to do with photography--I'm not interested in injuries. Believe me I'm not.

Q: What about the recurrence of, say, oh, monkeys, which goes back---

Winogrand: Listen, it's interesting, but it's interesting for photographic reasons, really.

Q: What are photographic reasons?

Winogrand: Basically, I mean, aah---well, let's say that, for me anyway, when a photograph is interesting it's interesting because of the kind of photographic problem it states---which has to do with the.... contest between content and form. And, you know, in terms of content, you can make a problem for yourself, I mean, make the contest difficult, let's say, with certain subject matter that is inherently dramatic.

An injury could be, a dwarf can be, a monkey---if you run into a monkey in some idiot context, automatically you've got a very real problem taking place in the photograph. I mean, how do you beat it?

Q: Are you saying then that your primary concern is kind of a formal one?

Winogrand: Of course.

Q: In what sense "formal?" Getting things on the page? Filling up the space?

Winogrand: You can't help doing that either; I mean, it just automatically happens when you make an exposure.

Q: Well, then I don't understand what the "formal" problem is.

Winogrand: It's, ah--

Q: --to make it not look formal.

Winogrand: No, sorry... You've got a number of things that take place that are peculiar to still photography. One" how a picture looks---what you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks. In other words, it's responsible for the form.

Q: It or you?

Winogrand: What you photograph is responsible for how a photograph looks---the form, the design, whatever word you want to use. Because of that there's no way a photograph has to look...in a sense. There are no formal rules of design that can apply. In other words, a photograph can look any way. It just depends basically on what you photograph.

Q: Well, the choice of the 28mm lens over 50mm is going to give you a different looking photograph.

Winogrand: It makes the problem----it ups the ante in a way, if you want to put it that way. You have more to contend with. Maybe it makes the problem a little bit more interesting.

Q: I always feel very precarious when I look at your images. I feel like I'm falling over. Is that because you're not--you don’t use a viewfinder?

Winogrand: I don't know why you feel the way you feel... What are you asking?

Q: Actually, what I'm asking is do you often shoot without using your viewfinder?

Winogrand: I never shoot without using the viewfinder--Oh, yes, there'll be a few times--I may have to hold the camera up over my head because for just physical reasons, but very rarely does that ever work.

Q: Are you conscious of that?

Winogrand: Of what?

Q: Of sort of an off-kilter thing happening.

Winogrand: Oh, yeah, sure. I pretty much know what I am doing.

Q: Is that an attempt to solve a photographic problem?

Winogrand: Generally it's to make one. Another reason can be just because physically I might have trouble to get what I want to include in [the frame], you know, just physically. And that's a good reason.

Q: You were talking about, you know, like if there were monkeys and they're in a strange context---are you saying that made the problem more difficult?

Winogrand: Yeah.

Q: Why do you think that is? You know, if you've already got this strange thing in front of you, why does it make it more difficult for you to make, you know, the--

Winogrand: Because that's what I know. It would be a boring photograph, at least to me, if it didn't involve itself in my game---whatever.

Q: Well, like the photograph of the black man and the [white] woman with the two monkeys--

Winogrand: Yeah, what about it?

Q: Like, was that difficult to make?

Winogrand: I don't know if that photograph is really--this selection is things I'm just thinking about more than anything else. It's all over the place. I don't know if that [picture] is that interesting photographically. I'm still--I mean, you know, it's sort of an automatic "yuk," I guess, and that could destroy you. I don't know...

Q: I'm wondering what, like, your concern with this is. Why photography?

Winogrand: I told you before. It's, aah--the thing itself is fascinating. The game, let's say, of trying to state photographic problems is, for me, absolutely fascinating.

Q: You keep trying to know more and more about the game?

Winogrand: I'm trying to learn more and more about what's possible, you know--really, I am answering your question.

Q: Yeah

Winogrand: I'm not dissembling

Q: Any change in your work you would attribute to somehow learning--the learning process?

Winogrand: Yeah. I think if I did tight editing, let's say [of this bunch of photographs], I'd say I'm a different photographer here than from those animals or whatever.

Q: Were the animals done in a concentrated period of time, or did they just kind of pop up as you--

Winogrand: Basically, they were done in a relatively concentrated period of time, I mean; I wasn't just working on them. But, I'd say I can safely say over a year's--about a year I went on--yeah, when I knew I had a game to play there...

Q: Do you look a lot at other people's photographs?

Winogrand: Sure, I look at photographs.

Q: Whose photographs do you find interesting?

Winogrand: Quickly, off the top of my head: Atget, Brassai, Kertesz, Weston, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Bresson.

Q: Do you like them for different reasons or do you find a reason?

Winogrand: I learn from them. I can learn from them.

Q: On the problem level, do you feel they've solved a problem, and you think, "thank God, I don't have to do that"?

Winogrand: It's not a question of solving. It's a question of stating.

Q: Stating?

Winogrand: Yeah. You don't solve anything ever, really. You simply state a problem which, when you're lucky, gives you some idea of what possible problems you can--it indicates, you know, your future headaches.

Q: But that's all related to the idea of the game--it's being a game?

Winogrand: Whatever word you want to use--you want to use work? Use the word, work.

Q: Work--play--

Winogrand: I use the word play; but you understand the word, play--if you ever watch children play--what do you observe when you watch children play? You know, they're dead serious. They're not on vacation.

Q: If the problem you're working on now is the contest between form and content, what was the problem before?

Winogrand: It's always--every photograph, every--somehow bang of the shutter--basically, I'm playing the game in a way.

Q: When you first started photographing, what was your, like primary interest in picking up the camera? Did you like people?

Winogrand: No, the process, really. I really liked--it was a very crazy thing to me, I mean, this business of being uncertain that it would come out. I still enjoy--I still don't understand why when you put a piece of paper in a tray with solution in it, it comes up.

It's still, in a sense, magic to me. It's a funny thing, you know. I've got two kids, and when they were very young, they used to come in the darkroom and I thought they'd be astounded by that. Nothing! When they got a little older, “then” they got astounded by it...

Q: Is it relevant to ask what you were doing before you began to take pictures?

Winogrand: I don't know...I had a camera but I had no darkroom facilities, nothing like that was available. And so, you know, I shot a roll of film, I sent it in, and stuff like that. And I was painting. I was studying painting, which is not valid because it's ridiculous to talk about it.

But I was at Columbia [University] and they had a camera club. I think I registered there for the fall term. And so I found out about this camera club and they told me they had this darkroom available twenty-four hours a day.
And I'd never done any darkroom work, so I went down. It must have been two weeks after I started there, and I'd say, give it another week, and I never went back to class. I'm telling you, it was basically the process...

Q: Well, like let's say [Robert] Frank's book of photographs---

Winogrand: What about it?

Q: You talked about learning from---

Winogrand: Yeah--

Q: his stuff---

Winogrand: I hope I did. I learned--

Q: I'm interested to learn, like, when you looked in the book, like, do you think there's anything you can say afterward what, you know, "I learned” or what might be different in your work afterward?

Winogrand: Well, let's put it--you have to talk, speak about photographs, specific photographs...

Let's say, primarily--let's say Walker Evans in a general sense was maybe the first man who, in his book, states that you could--or rather the work states that America was a place to photograph in.
Just on that level. Of course, there's much more about those photographs; they're astounding.

Q: You think you can get different things from a specific photograph?

Winogrand: Yeah, you can go into your own mumbo jumbo.

Q: Would you go into a mumbo jumbo about [Robert] Frank's photograph of the flag or would you just look at it?

Winogrand: That photograph doesn't interest me that much. There are photographs in there far more interesting. The gasoline station photograph would be.

Q: Would you go into a mumbo jumbo or would you just look at it?

Winogrand: That [the gasoline station] photograph, in the first place, is an exercise in, ah--it's a lesson, number one, in just camera operation, in a sense. It's a lesson in how responsible that machine is for how photographs can look.

Begin with that. To me that was one of the most important pictures in the book. It's also a photograph of nothing, there's nothing happening there.

I mean, the subject matter has no dramatic ability of its own whatsoever and yet somehow it looks, what it is, it's the most mundane--and there's nothing happening, there's no physical action.

Q: You get the feeling that he played the game very well?

Winogrand: Extremely well. That he could conceive of that being a photograph in the first place is, aah--I don't know if he, on any conscious level, thinks in terms of this "game" or whatever. And I certainly don't really, in a conscious way, worry about it when I'm working.

The contest between form and content is what, is what art is about--it's art history. That's what basically everybody has ever contended with. The problem is uniquely complex in still photography.

Q: How so?

Winogrand: Well, in terms of what a camera does. Again, you go back to that original idea that what you photograph is responsible for how it [the photograph] looks. And it's not plastic, in a way. The problem is unique in photographic terms.

Q: Well, if what you photograph is responsible for what it looks like, what if ten people take a photograph of the same thing?

Winogrand: The same way? If they are standing in the same place, the same kind of lens on the camera, the same film, the right exposure, and their cameras are in the same position? It would be the same picture--

The camera's dumb, it don't [sic] care who's pushing the button. It doesn't know--

Q: What is it, say, in a photo, that makes it interesting instead of dead; what makes it alive instead of dead?

Winogrand: Well, let's say--let's go back to the gasoline picture... Let's say [it's] the photographer's understanding of 'possibilities.'

Let me say something else. When he [Robert Frank] took that photograph, he couldn't possibly know--he just could not know that it would work, that it would be a photograph. He knew he probably had a chance. In other words, he cannot know what that's going to look like as a photograph.

I mean, understanding fully that he's going to render what he sees; he still does not know what it's going to look like as a photograph.

Something, the fact of photographing something changes---I mean, when you photograph--if I photograph you I don't have you, I have a photograph of you. It's got its own thing. That's really what photography, still photography, is about in the simplest sentence, I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.

Basically, that's why I photograph, in the simplest language. That's the beginning of it and then we get to play the games.

Q: But the thing that's intriguing is not really knowing what the result is going to be like.

Winogrand: Of course. What I know bores me. You know, you get into the business of commercial photography, and that's all you do is photograph what you know. That's what you're hired for.

And it's very easy to make successful photographs--it's very easy. I'm a good craftsman and I can have this particular intention: let's say, I want a photograph that's going to push a certain button in an audience, to make them laugh or love, feel warm or hate, or what--I know how to do this.

It's the easiest thing in the world to do that, to make successful photographs. It's a bore. I certainly never wanted to be a photographer to bore myself. It's no fun--life is too short...

Q: Do you shoot pool?

Winogrand: What?

Q: Do you shoot pool?

Winogrand: I have, yeah. I was good. Ah, yeah, why?

Q: I shoot pool, I don't know-- (tape unclear)

Winogrand: There was a time in my life when I lied in one, you know, when I was a kid. Once in a while I get a chance--

Q: I feel the same thing, like how you're talking about photograph--I don't know--I can't--

Winogrand: Alright

Q: You feel you've been hustled in a pool room... Are there any other things that relate photographically that are not necessarily other photographs?

By this I mean, do you ever get ideas--not ideas--is your education ever expanded by an interest in something else other than photography?

Winogrand: I would think so. A heck of a lot. Reading and music and painting and sculpture and other stuff. Basketball, baseball, hockey, etc.

Certainly, you know, you can always learn from some--from somebody else's--from some intelligence. I think. I hope. Nobody exists in a vacuum.

Where do you come from? The first time I really got out of New York as a photographer was in 1955 and I wanted to go around the country photographing. And a friend of mine, at the time, I was talking to him about it--a guy named Dan Weiner. I don't know if you know his name. He's dead now.[He] asked me if I had ever seen Walker Evans's book and I said no I had never heard of Walker Evans. He said, if you're going around the country, take a look at the book. And he did me a big fat favor.

And then it's funny, I forget what year when Robert Frank's book came out. He was working pretty much around that time, '55 or whenever it was. And there were photographs in there, particularly that gas station photograph, that I learned an immense amount from. I mean, I hope I learned. At least, I feel very responsible.... (tape unclear)

Q: What you're responding to, is it the quality of the intelligence that states the problem?

Winogrand: Yeah, I don't give a rap about gasoline stations...

End of Interview

Saul Leiter Interview (Parts 1 - 3)

2011-09-11T17:17:00.010+01:00

Extracts from a forthcoming film on the great photographer/painter Saul Leiter by Tomas Leach

Saul Leiter 1 from Tomas Leach on Vimeo.

Saul Leiter 2 from Tomas Leach on Vimeo.

Saul Leiter 3 from Tomas Leach on Vimeo.

John Salt, Photorealist painter (video interview)

2011-09-11T16:52:00.011+01:00

See and hear famed superrealist painter John Salt talk about his work (including watching him paint) here.

As one of the (founding?) artists of superrealism, this UK born artist's work was hugely influential. Helping to break the dominance of abstract art in the late 1960's and to create an alternative realist art to rival photography.

John Salt - Side Street Parking (1987)

2011-09-11T14:11:00.004+01:00

John Salt
"Side Street Parking" , 1987, watercolor on paper, 37 x 56.5

Leon Levinstein - his words and thoughts

2011-09-10T08:30:00.017+01:00

Leon Levinstein, as you might have guessed is an artist whose work means a great deal to me. I've read about his life and seen a lot of his published work, and now with the recent interview, actually heard his voice and his views. I've always admired his work but now with the interview something extra, something I hadn't considered before, occurs to me.

That there's something oddly heroic about the way he carried himself. That despite the often well intentioned support of others, such as Helen Gee and the (many) possibilities for promotion available to him at key points in his life, he chose to take a willfully stubborn but quite defiant alternative view of himself and his work.

The path Levinstein chose is not for everyone, that's for sure.

It demands an almost monastic devotion to work that demands personal sacrifices many lesser artists would find daunting and a strength of will, a sense of purpose, that others would find impossible to sustain and maintain. But his work shows that his efforts, whatever the cost to him personally, were not wasted.

Today's photography scene (and also to some extent that of Levinstein's era) is full of characters with expansive ego's, who seem to concentrate their energies on self publicity and self aggrandisement, rather than choosing to focus their time and talent on creating original and genuinely non-derivative creative work.

Leon Levinstein was different. He did exactly what he said he would do during his lifetime and left us all,as a result of his efforts, a lasting legacy of wonderfully rich and idiosyncratic photogoraphy.

Do yourself a favour and check out some of the books mentioned in my previous post or better yet, see some of his original prints if you can on a gallery wall.

You'll be glad you made the effort!

===========================

Excerpted below are his comments (from the audio interview posted yesterday.)

(Words in italics below are mine.)

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If you look at my pictures, you’ll see, I didn’t go into places ....where only Miss Vanderbilt or Miss Rockefeller is living, you know.

I go in all type of neighborhoods. And naturally you use discretion.

It’s very important to use discretion. You don’t ....all of sudden become a fool, because it can be a bit dangerous....you’re not going to get shot, but you could, you know, get into a fight, break your equipment.

Days by, they didn’t (in the past) know what the lens was. They never had a camera. Now everybody knows.

Everybody has a camera and they know the lens...what the lens is for. And if it’s pointed at them, they know their picture’s being taken.
(In the past) they weren’t sure, because they never had a camera, especially the older people.

But most people don’t particularly care to be photographed. And if you ask them, the picture’s ruined. You know, they pose; it’s no good....what you want to see is something that’s spontaneous. You don’t want to have them posing for you.

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...It’s sort of a vicarious experience when you photograph. Because you’re always on the outside. They’re having a good time there, maybe a family, or a couple families, having a picnic, eating this fried chicken and potato salad and all that junk. And you’re on the outside, you know, trying to sneak a picture.

You walk around them and around them and look and look and see if for a moment something might happen, and they don’t invite you to sit down and have fried chicken. You’re always on the outside.

And then you go somewhere else, but again you’re on the outside. And if you have somebody with you it’s no good, they detract you from what you’re doing. So you got to be alone and work alone. And it’s a lonely—a very lonely occupation, if you want to call it that.

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One thing I always try to do, if possible, is never to speak mildly or softly. I don’t think any photographer should. You should speak loud and clear. And that’s the way I try to take my pictures. Not, you know, looking for poetic things. If there should be, fine. But I make, you know, as strong a statement as I possibly can. And that probably would be a better way to say it.

And, another thing, I never go out with any intentions of photographing any particular thing. I let anything that comes within my sight or in my path that excites me to photograph, I’ll photograph.

I don’t care what it is. But I never go out there and say, "Well, I’m going to look for certain type of pictures today"—maybe, you know, "It'll be great art, or I can sell them," or something like that.

Or with the intention of going out and trying to take pictures that might have a market. Never. I just go out and photograph and if something I see comes—that I can reach and I’m interested in—I will photograph. I don’t believe in intellectualizing and working in any particular method. Just photograph, period.

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A good photograph will prove to the viewer how little our eyes permit us to see. Most people, really, don’t see—see only what they have always seen and what they expect to see—where a photographer, if he’s good, will see everything.

And better if he sees things he doesn’t expect to see.

Jem Cohen on Leon Levinstein

2011-09-10T08:23:00.002+01:00

Leon was a somewhat contradictory figure.

He wasn’t a naive folk artist. He loved photography and the history of photography.

He loved to go to museums (and) he’d studied some as a painter.

But on the other hand, he was not an intellectual.

He was very unpretentious, deeply down to earth, and quite a loner. And this all fed into his work.

He was, in his way, very private and soft-spoken, or at least he wasn’t prone to intellectualizing about photography or art work.

Hear Leon Levinstein talk about his work (MP3 format)

2011-09-09T22:25:00.003+01:00

Now hear Leon Levinstein's own words & voice in a rare 1998 interview, in MP3 format.

Leon Levinstein - The Forgotten Master

2011-09-09T17:46:00.027+01:00

Leon Levinstein, unlike Vivian Maier, did have a shot at recognition during his lifetime. But unlike his contemporaries, he chose not to take the opportunities that came his way choosing instead to forge his own quiet and somewhat lonely path to greatness.
Since his death, this great talent has slowly received the recognition that should have been his due, during his lifetime.

Several recent books, Leon Levinstein Obsession

and

Leon Levinstein: The Moment of Exposure

and exhibitions, such as last years exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art 'Hipsters, Hustlers, and Handball Players: Leon Levinstein's New York Photographs, 1950–1980' have shown at last, the range of his extraordinary talent to a contemporary audience.

Featured below are a few images from last years Metropolitan Museum of Art show, including his iconic close-up of a man in the street (NY.)

All images are © Howard Greenberg Gallery

Close-up Portrait of Man on Street, New York City
© Howard Greenberg Gallery

Man, Mill's Hotel: Bleecker Street, New York City
© Howard Greenberg Gallery

54th Street, New York: Woman with Hairnet, in Winter Coat with Fur Collar, New York City
© Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier - Self Portrait

2011-09-08T14:30:00.005+01:00

From the great Vivian Maier.com website, comes a self portrait of Vivian Maier - taken in 1955 in New York.

Vivian Maier - colour image

2011-08-24T22:29:00.005+01:00

A colour image from the late Vivian Maier. Another name to watch out for - as more of her archive is catalogued and gets published.

Vivian Maier homepage

2011-08-17T21:27:00.002+01:00

"A photograph is not an accident—it is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure...."
Ansel Adams

"My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made.
That's what was there to deal with."
Gary Winnogrand

The Station (Night & Day)

2011-06-12T18:24:00.001+01:00

A proof copy of my long awaited book 'red' is winging its way across the Atlantic as I post these images. Once 'red' is completed (after making minor edits and showing it to 'trusted' friends and contributors) I aim to get started on the transit book.

Since my last post I've been watching some of the blurb webinars posted on the blurb support site burned into MP4 format om my i-pod. Since I'm a little cynical about the quality of free advice, I must admit I wasn't expecting a quality product so imagine my surprise when I found out how good they were. Especially the 2 part presentations on sequencing and planning a photographic book.

This all comes at a good time for me, following my growing confidence with using Adobe InDesign and now from blurb some professional advice on book creation. All of which combines to turn what had been a largely intuitive process into something more practical and structured.

Which brings me to 'Transit' - and the images below. Which continue the series of photographs made several years ago on the subject of commuting - but this time showing something more of the large train station at journeys end - Kings Cross circa 2007.

Hope you like them.

Waiting at the station (more pictures from Transit)

2011-05-30T19:05:00.001+01:00

TRANSIT PART 2- THE STATION - Photographs and edits for the next book

2011-05-23T16:51:00.006+01:00

This is part 2 of my blog post.

This set from the Transit project features photographs of passengers waiting at the station - either inside the station or just outside.

As mentioned in my last post, these photographs were taken about 3-4 years ago using a small lightweight digital camera.

TRANSIT PART 1- PASSENGERS - Photographs and edits for the next book

2011-05-23T16:43:00.004+01:00

As I wind down from finishing the red book, I've started work on the next book 'Transit'.

For the first time anywhere, I thought I'd share a selection of 'finished roughs'.
This post features photographs of commuters 'in transit' - on trains heading into London or going 'home'.

I've used Nik software (Dfine & Sharpener Pro) and Noise Ninja to help visualise & create these new 'finished' images.

The photographs were taken about 3 years ago using a small Casio digital camera.

Comparing Louis Faurer (colour images) with Fred Herzog

2011-04-07T20:27:00.006+01:00

For a look at early color street photography, it's worth comparing Louis Faurer's work taken in the 1940's with many of Fred Herzog's signature images (see todays earlier post for details.)

Herzog talks of the film he was using, an early Kodachrome slide film, as being rated 12 ASA. It's almost inconceivable to many contemporary photographers that such limited tools could be used creatively - especially in dim/low light situations without a flash.

And yet, Louis Faurer, using a similar (same?) film stock and having only the street lighting of Times Square as a light source, creates mini masterpeices of colour, emotion and energy.

The book 'Louis Faurer' by Anne Wilkes Tucker has more examples and is a great source of information on this highly underrated American original.

14th Street New York c.1948 (also known as Man with Goggles)

Family Times Square c.1948

The amazing Canadian photographer - Fred Herzog

2011-04-07T19:57:00.005+01:00

I thought I'd share something rare.

The discovery of a genuine new talent in photography. And someone who has been working at full strength since the 1950's in colour.

His name is Fred Herzog and I came across him through my job at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design via the book Fred Herzog Photographs

From what I've read, he was aware of the work of more established photographers like Robert Frank and Walker Evans, but his relative isolation working primarily in Vancouver, Canada gives his photographs a unique quality all their own - where his influences are kept in check by his strong colour sense and the balance of urban/rural subject matter he encountered.

Here are a few of my own favourites. For more of his work check out the Equinox Gallery website.

Flaneur Granville 1960

Bogners Grocery 1960

Elysium Cleaners 1958

Lucy Georgia 1968

Man with Bandage 1968

U.R. Next 1959

Garry Winogrand Video interview (some extracts from him & thoughts from me)

2011-01-29T23:29:00.002Z

An Interview with Garry Winogrand - his quotes and ideas ...and some thoughts from me

To accompany the video appearing on the home page of this blog, here are some selected quotes from Garry Winnogrand's interview with Barbara Diamonstein from 1981 and some thoughts of mine (in bold) about his comments.

D: How would you prefer to describe yourself?
W: I'm a photographer, a still photographer. That's it.

D: If you don't like "street photographer," how do you respond to that other tiresome phrase', "snapshot aesthetic"?
W: I knew that was coming. That's another stupidity. The people who use the term don't even know the meaning. They use it to refer to photographs they believe are loosely organized, or casually made, whatever you want to call it. Whatever terms you like.

The fact is, when they're talking about snapshots they're talking about the family album picture, which is one of the most precisely made photographs. Everybody's fifteen feet away and smiling. The sun is over the viewer's shoulder. That's when the picture is taken, always. It's one of the most carefully made photographs that ever happened. People are just dumb. They misunderstand.

D: That's an interesting point, particularly coming from someone who takes — or rather, composes and then snaps— lightning-fast shots.
W: I'll say this, I'm pretty fast with a camera when I have to be. However, I think it's irrelevant. I mean, what if I said that every photograph I made was set up? From the photograph, you can't prove otherwise. You don't know anything from the photograph about how it was made, really.

But every photograph could be set up. If one could imagine it, one could set it up. The whole discussion is a way of not talking about photographs.

D: Well, what would be a better way to describe that?
W: See, I don't think time is involved in how the thing is made. It's like, "There I was 40,000 feet in the air," whatever. You've got to deal with how photographs look, what's there, not how they're made. Even with what camera.

D: So what is really important
W: Is the photograph.

D: ...is how you organize complex situations or material to make a picture.
W: The picture, right. Not how I do anything. In the end, maybe the correct language would be how the fact of putting four edges around a collection of information or facts transforms it.
A photograph is not what was photographed, it's something else.

The fact is, the speed at which successful examples of this type of photography are made, whether on location in the street or other settings, does make it difficult to 'calculate' with precision how a picture will look at the time of exposure.

However, while there is very real (and actually quite necessary) imprecision built into the art of creating so called street photography (e.g. why bother if reality could be locked down and chance were eliminated?) images made quickly and with forethought are not as a result de facto 'snapshots'.

The word snapshot is used as a derisive word (which is why Winogrand reacted so swiftly to its mention) and meant to demean and belittle photographs that are taken rapidly and often in succession.

Implying that anyone taking pictures quickly was somehow 'sloppy' or 'casual'. And that this method of creation could 'never' be the result of calculation or the product of pre-determined decision!

D: Does it really not matter what kind of equipment you use?
W: Oh, I know what I like to use myself. I use Leicas, but when I look at the photograph, I don't ask the photograph questions. Mine or anybody else's.

The only time I've ever dealt with that kind of thing is when I'm teaching. You talk about people who are interested in "how." But when I look at photographs, I couldn't care less "how." You see?

D: What do you look for?
W: I look at a photograph. What's going on? What's happening, photographically? If it's interesting, I try to understand why.

D: And how do you expect the viewer to respond to your photographs?
W: I have no expectations. None at all.

D: Well, what do you want to evoke?
W: I have no ideas on that subject. Two people could look at the same flowers and feel differently about them. Why not?

I'm not making ads. I couldn't care less. Everybody's entitled to their own experience.

How important are humor and irony in your work?
W: I don't know. See, I don't get involved, frankly, in that way. When I see something, I know why something's funny or seems to be funny. But in the end it's just another picture as far as I'm concerned.

D: When you looked at those contact sheets, you noticed that something was going on. I've often wondered how a photographer who takes tens of thousands of photographs — and by now it may even be hundreds of thousands of photographs — keeps track of the material.
How do you know what you have, and how do you find it?
W: Badly. That's all I can say. There've been times it's been just impossible to find a negative or whatever.
But I'm basically just a one man operation, and so things get messed up.
I don't have a filing system that's worth very much.

D: But don't you think that's important to your work?
W: I'm sure it is, but I can't do anything about it. It's hopeless. I've given up.

You just go through a certain kind of drudgery every time you have to look for something. I've got certain things grouped by now, but there's a drudgery in finding them. There's always stuff missing.

D: When I was taking your photograph earlier today, with well-intended whimsy I tilted my camera in an attempt to make my own Winogrand. From what I understand, that's not how it's done. What is the meaning of the horizontal tilted frame that you often use? And is your camera tilted when you make the picture?
W: It isn't tilted, no.

D: What are you doing?
W: Well, look, there's an arbitrary idea that the horizontal edge in a frame has to be the point of reference. And if you study those pictures, you'll see I use the vertical often enough. I use either edge. If it's as good as the vertical edge, it's as good as the horizontal edge.

I never do it without a reason. The only ones you'll see are the ones that work. There's various reasons for doing it. But they're not tilted, you see.

D: How do you create that angle, then?
W: You use the vertical edge as the point of reference, instead of the horizontal edge. I have a picture of a beggar, where there's an arm coming into the frame from the side.
And the arm is parallel to the horizontal edge and it makes it work. It's all games, you know. But it keeps it interesting to do, to play.

Actually this conversation is a bit odd! They're having a formal argument about the conventions of the picture surface.
Conventions that largely relate to the history and language of painting as it has evolved over hundreds of years.

Quite odd, when you consider that Winogrand's work was largely about re-defining experience and reality in terms of the language of photography.

Think about it. Why should a slanted frame actually denote anything other than how the camera was held?

D: Several years ago a student did ask you which qualities in a picture make it interesting instead of dead. And you replied with a telling statement describing what photography is all about. You said you didn't know what something would look like in a photograph until it had been photographed.

A rather simple sentence that you used has been widely identified with you, and that sentence is: "I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed." That was about five or six years ago. And I know there are few things that displease you more than being bored. So I would hope that you have since amended or extended that idea. How would you express it now?
W: Well, I don't think it was that simple then, either. There are things I photograph because I'm interested in those things. But in the end, you know what I'm saying there.

Earlier tonight, I said the photograph isn't what was photographed, it's something else. It's about transformation. And that's what it is. That hasn't changed, largely. But it's not that simple. Let's put it this way — I photograph what interests me all the time.

I live with the pictures to see what that thing looks like photographed. I'm saying the same thing; I'm not changing it. I photograph what interests me. I'm not saying anything different, you see.

D: Well, what is it about a photograph that makes it alive or dead?
W: How problematic it is! It's got to do with the contention between content and form.

Invariably that's what's responsible for its energies, its tensions, its being interesting or not. There are photographs that function just to give you information. I never saw a pyramid, but I've seen photographs; I know what a pyramid or a sphinx looks like.

There are pictures that do that, but they satisfy a different kind of interest. Most photographs are of life, what goes on in the world. And that's boring, generally. Life is banal, you know. Let's say that an artist deals with banality. I don't care what the discipline is.

This distinction that Winogrand talks about, about the difference between photography as 'illustration' as a simple descriptive medium and photography as a tool for discovery is a critical one.

And something that still eludes many/most ambitious photographers including famous practitioners.

The full force of what he's saying in this interview about this critical difference in intent is something I'm personally still pondering and working through.

D: And how do you find the mystery in the banal?
W: Well, that's what's interesting.
There is a transformation, you see, when you just put four edges around it. That changes it. A new world is created.

D: Does that discreet context make it more descriptive, and by transforming it give it a whole new layer of meaning?
W: You're asking me why that happens. Aside from the fact of just taking things out of context, I don't know why. That's part of a mystery. In a way, a transformation is a mystery to me.

But there is a transformation, and that's fascinating. Just think how minimal somebody's family album is. But you start looking at one of them, and the word everybody will use is "charming."

Something just happened. It's automatic, just operating a camera intelligently. You've got a lot going for you, you see. By just describing well with it, something happens.

And therein lies the magic!

D: You were teaching in Texas then, so you had some familiarity with cowboys and the West. It's been said that those rodeo pictures don't tell very pleasant truths. The image of the cowboy hero is somewhat deflated. Was that your intent?
W: My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with.

The raw material of a lot of street photography is banality.
The difficulty is working 'through' what's there to see more than simply 'surfaces'.

D: But one does select what one photographs, and what one doesn't
W: Well, if you take a good look at the book, it's largely a portrait gallery of faces — faces that I found dramatic. And some of those turned out to be reasonably dramatic photographs. But that's all it is, I think. They're in action; there's people dancing.
Plus some actual rodeo action and some other animal pictures, livestock stuff. That's the way we're living. It's one world in this world. But it's not coverage; it's a record of my subjective interests.

D: When Tod Papageorge was the curator of one of your exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, he observed that you do not create pictures of significant form, but rather of signifying form. What does that phrase mean?
W: I think that's what photographic description is about. That's how a camera describes things.

D: Throughout your work, there is a narrative voice, and an active one at that. Do you agree?
W: I generally deal with something happening. So let's say that what's out there is a narrative. Often enough, the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening.

Almost the way puns function. They call the meaning of things into question. You know, why do you laugh at a pun? Language is basic to all of our existences in this world. We depend on it. So a pun calls the meaning of a word into question, and it upsets us tremendously.
We laugh because suddenly we find out we're not going to get killed. I think a lot of things work that way with photographs.

His comment that 'the picture plays with the question of what actually is happening' is a tremendously powerful and subtle obervation.

So much popular writing on photography continues to this day to assert the 'reality' of photography.

When considered within the strictly scientific sense of the word, photographs at the actual time of exposure/creation contain neutral 'information'.

The idea of obtaining 'reality' automatically as a consequence of taking photographs still seems somehow an implicit assumption.

Also the idea of any photographic 'artist' actively subverting a strictly documentary 'looking' sense of reality to create something 'playful' still seems, as an idea (30 years later) wonderfully fresh.

D: We've talked about the influence of people like Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, of course, on your work. How would you contrast your work to theirs?
W: I wouldn't. We're different, I think. With Evans, if nothing else, it's just in terms of the time we photograph. And my attitude to a lot of things is different from Evans'.

Let's say I have a different kind of respect for the things in the world than he does. I have a different kind of seriousness. This might be misunderstood, but I certainly think that my attitude is different. And generally the cameras I use, and how I use them, are different. The things that he photographs describe a certain kind of exquisite taste.
And let's say the things I photograph may describe a lack of that. You know what I mean? He was like a very good shopper.

D: And you?
W: I think the problem is different. I was thinking about him and Atget. The things they photographed were often beautiful, and that's a hell of a problem, to photograph something that's beautiful to start with, you see.

The photograph should be more interesting or more beautiful than what was photographed. I deal with much more mundane objects, at least. I don't really; actually, I deal with it all. I can't keep away from the other things, but I don't avoid garbage.

D: What general advice would you give to young photographers? What should they be doing?
W: The primary problem is to learn to be your own toughest critic. You have to pay attention to intelligent work, and to work at the same time.
You see. I mean, you've got to bounce off better work. It's a matter of working.

Rare Walker Evans interview (3 of 3)

2010-12-31T17:59:00.003Z

Here's the final part of the rare Walker Evans interview from 1971.

In this last part, Walker Evans and Paul Cummings discuss the following topics:

working at Life magazine
why Walker Evans didn't get a job with Steichen during WW2
Evans feelings about working at Fortune
Evans major show in 1938 at the Museum of Modern Art & book
defining & developing his approach to photography
using signs & typography in his work
printing technique & presentation of prints
on celebrity & photography (including criticism of Karsh & Cartier-Bresson)
subway photography project
about photography collectors
about teaching photography
feelings about 'professional' photography and value of non-commercial work

CUMMINGS: This is December 23, 1971 – Paul Cummings talking to Walker Evans in his apartment in New York City. On the previous tape we talked about the 1930s and what was going on. But what about James Soby? You met him at some point. What was that all about?

EVANS: Well, Soby wanted to study photography and Lincoln Kirstein suggested that I teach him. They were friends. Soby asked me to come up to his house in West Hartford, Connecticut. Which I did.

I spent a week there. He had a lot of equipment. I just gave him – He’s written about that himself. He said that visit taught him that he couldn’t do it.

CUMMINGS: Well, but sometimes you have to do it to find out, I think, don’t you?

EVANS: Yes. Soby is a very nice man and always has been. He is almost incurably the rich amateur with wonderful equipment. Embarrassing.

CUMMINGS: You had an exhibition in the early thirties at the Museum of Modern Art. Wasn’t there one there in - ?

EVANS: That’s not very clear to me. That’s always put down as their first exhibition. That was Victorian architecture that was sort of a pet little project of Lincoln Kirstein’s which he –

CUMMINGS: Oh, you talked about going to –

EVANS: - invented and fine art and took me around and we did a few things. It just wasn’t my idea; it wasn’t a very important thing to do. It was historical research.

But it meant something else much more important, which was meeting and getting to know Kirstein, a wonderful mind, a very stimulating boy. I guess he was still an undergraduate at Harvard.

CUMMINGS: Have you kept up an association with him over the years?

EVANS: Oh, sure. He’s very hard to keep up with. There are times he won’t even speak to you on the street. He’s temperamental and a little bit crazy, or acts crazy.

But you pay no attention if you know him well.The next time he’ll throw his arms around you and want to see you. I’ve got him down as one of the wonders of the age. I think he is a very important man with a great mind. He’s got his crazy side, too.

CUMMINGS: Sometime after the thirties you got involved with Time-Life and Fortune. That was in the forties, wasn’t it?

EVANS: Yes. I went to Time as a writer in 1943.

CUMMINGS: Was there a particular reason why you went there?

EVANS: Sure. I needed a job. I couldn’t get into the war. Photography was abstentio so you couldn’t be one. There was no film. No work except in the war.

Steichen turned me down. I tried to get into his outfit. Do you know why he turned me down?

CUMMINGS: Why?

EVANS: Stryker told him so.

CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

EVANS: Yes. Said I was difficult. I found that out later. Steichen told me that.

CUMMINGS: That’s interesting. How was your association with Stryker since we’ve bought him up here again?

EVANS: I’ve been through that with you, haven’t I?

CUMMINGS: Yes, but toward the end. He sort of carried over from –

EVANS: Carried over – what do you mean?

CUMMINGS: Well, I mean, you know, he said – or was it just because he knew Steichen that he would say no as far as - ?

EVANS: Well, I was difficult to him.

CUMMINGS: Oh, I see.

EVANS: I made things quite hard for him I must admit. Sure. I didn’t think much of him and I gave him a hard time and I treated him rather contemptuously. I had contempt for him.

To me he was a johnny-come-lately bureaucrat who was just out to do something for himself. And they didn’t understand what he was doing I thought.

What he understood was what people like Ben Shahn and myself and a couple of others told him. Generally we’d tell him what to do. He sort of admitted that anyway elsewhere himself.

CUMMINGS: You did talk a little bit about the Time-Life activities and then you went to Fortune.

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: But one thing we didn’t really get into is the portfolios and things that you did for Fortune which you said you initiated.

EVANS: Some I would. I was in a good position there to go to the editors, bring ideas and put them directly up, going beyond and over the heads of the art director and the art department because I was hired by the management, not by the art department.

And then they made me an associate editor anyway so I was in a position to write and have ideas and execute them.

CUMMINGS: So you did the whole - ?

EVANS: Yes. By “excuse” I mean I didn’t do this with every idea. But if I had a good idea and I managed to persuade the editors to do it then first of all, I would conceive it, photograph it, write it, edit it, and lay it out and present it done, written and laid out and photographed.

So it gave me a sense that I was doing something there that was my own.

CUMMINGS: You just didn’t get fed into the mill?

EVANS: No. That didn’t go for everything I did. Every once in a while I would get caught up in that big machinery there. They would need something and I was there and they were paying me and I thought I’d do it.

I never did anything that I thought was degrading, but I did things that I didn’t want to do every once in a while.

CUMMINGS: You’ve never used – or have you used very few of those photographs in you exhibitions?

EVANS: I’ve used quite a lot. And overflow, too. You see, if I went off on a trip for Fortune I had a wonderful time. I would make lots and lots of photographs and with their knowledge could have these things. I didn’t do anything with them to speak of.

I certainly wasn’t allowed to compete with them. But, for example, putting them in exhibitions was something they rather liked. I’d do that every once in a while. Or in books.

But I didn’t compete. I wouldn’t say, take a Fortune spread and put it in Look, or anything like that. I never did that.

CUMMINGS: I was always curious why you had never gotten involved in any other kind of photo activities or anything. You know, you never –

EVANS: I’m not a joiner or an involved man. Instinctively and temperamentally I don’t do that sort of thing.

CUMMINGS: Do you think that working for Fortune had an influence on how you took photographs or how you saw things?

EVANS: No. I think it sort of kept me alive, kept my hand in. Really there was a duality there that was a little sad and a little embarrassing as its worst; and that is that I don’t think they quite knew how to use me.

There was some good will on their part, some on mine; some ill will, too. But in general I wasn’t very happy. But I don’t think any artist in this country is very professionally happy.

I consider myself lucky to be able to make a decent living. But they didn’t really make what I would call really creative or intelligent use of me. I think they realize it more and more now.

It’s the fault of that kind of system of group journalism and the group mind. And also Luce’s fundamental direction and ends were not mine at all.

CUMMINGS: But yet you stayed there for a long time, didn’t you?

EVANS: Yes. Well, you know, it was a kind of civilized place within its framework. Of course, inside and outside the Luce organization has its insidious and even sinister side.

But it’s such a large thing for very bright people and you can find places in there that are habitable.

CUMMINGS: So it gave you a kind of base.

EVANS: Oh, yes. I had good friends there. And all the comings and goings of that place in the thirties and forties – almost every gifted man in American writing and in art went through there.

CUMMINGS: You had a later show at the Museum of Modern Art in – what – 1937?

EVANS: 1938. That was more important. That’s the one I remember because that to my mind was the first big photographic show that I’ve had, and it was the first big one they gave. I don’t consider that business about architecture a show.

CUMMINGS: The other one? Well, how did that come about?

EVANS: Again, Kirstein had a lot to do with that. I remember he helped me put together the book. Kirstein never worked with the Museum but he was close to them in a friendly way all the time.
He and Tom Mayberry (who has since died), and I did this. Alfred Barr was away. Although Alfred has always been very interested in photography.

They decided to put this thing into the Museum. For museums it was quite a revolutionary step. They hadn’t done that before. They had paintings and prints but never photography as art.

CUMMINGS: Were you pleased with the exhibition?

EVANS: Oh, very. Yes. I remember I hung that myself. Beaumont Newhall was the curator of photography. I didn’t feel I had any need for him. I was very rude to him.

I’ve always regretted it, of course, since. He was very nice about it. But I just brushed him aside and hung up the show.

CUMMINGS: Paul Magriel was telling me recently that you changed a lot of things.

EVANS: I did, yes. I was really angry at Newhall’s wife. She wanted to have a hand in that. I wasn’t going to have any of that.

CUMMINGS: But it worked. Well, that was really your first big public exhibition like that?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Did it do anything as far as your photographic career was concerned?

EVANS: Oh, very much so. It was like a calling card. It made it.

The book particularly was a passport for me. Sure. It established my style and everything. Oh, yes. And as time went on it became more and more important. It turned out to be a landmark really.

CUMMINGS: So the catalogue went around.

EVANS: Yes, because that established the style more than I realized at the time.

CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

EVANS: Oh, yes. Sure.

CUMMINGS: So you feel that it’s important then to have an exhibition so you can see what you’re doing in that sense?

EVANS: No, it wasn’t that so much. Although that is important to any artist.
But this was particularly important because, as I say, more than I realized it established the documentary style as art in photography.

For the first time it was influential, you see. The Museum is a very influential place.

CUMMINGS: Right. You refer to the “documentary style.” How do you define that?

EVANS: It’s a very important matter. I use the word “style” particularly because in talking about it many people say “documentary photograph.”

Well, literally a documentary photograph is a police report of a dead body or an automobile accident or something like that.

But the style of detachment and record is another matter. That applied to the world around us is what I do with the camera, what I want to see done with the camera.

CUMMINGS: But there’s a certain attitude or feeling that you get from looking at your photographs because of the way that the camera sort of looks straight out. There are no tricky angles. There is no glossy lighting. It’s just a certain moment in time. It’s a very straightforward approach. Did you develop that consciously? Or did it just naturally -- ?

EVANS: That’s a very important matter too. That took time to establish.

I was doing that instinctively because I thought that was the way I ought to be doing it but without thinking very much about it. And I also was very lonely in it because nobody thought of that or recognized it very much.

Now it’s been vindicated more than in most cases. I happen to be an artist who has been treated justly by time and by the world, that it, my own style has been established and credited to me.

Lots of inventors, which a stylist is, don’t get credit for their inventions. In this case I did, luckily.

CUMMINGS: I noticed at Yale last week in the exhibition – which you can’t tell so much from the book – but when you see the prints there’s a quality of light which is very kind of – I don’t know – silvery or something.

EVANS: Mmhmm.

CUMMINGS: Are you interested in things like that?

EVANS: Oh, yes. Sure. I’m interested in the style of light. Well, of course, light almost is photography. So I care about what it is.

And there are all kinds of light. There’s high noon, and sunlight, and there’s cross light. I like to work in direct but in subdued cross light. Dawn and dusk are the times to work with a camera I think. But not romantically, just –

CUMMINGS: Well, the shadows are always quite apparent.

EVANS: Yes. I think that’s important. You can’t always do that in architecture because you have no control over where the sun is and where the building is placed.

But I’ve noticed just almost unconsciously that, if I can, I get the light falling in a certain way on a façade, let’s say.

CUMMINGS: Is there a reason why you’ve picked, say, the older buildings that you’ve photographed? Is it because they’re there? Or what interests you as subject?

EVANS: What was the adjective you used? Did you say “older” buildings?

CUMMINGS: Yes. You know, like an abandoned mansion or one of those old frame houses, or a gas station, or stores.

EVANS: Well, this sort of shows within itself. I think that’s just a matter of taste, a love for that kind of thing. Again, that’s instinctive.

CUMMINGS: Also a lot of them have signs. Are you interested in letters and in words?

EVANS: Yes. More and more that’s coming to a head right now. Oh, yes, lettering and signs are very important to me.

There are infinite possibilities both decorative in itself and as popular art, as folk art, and also as symbolism and meaning and surprise and double meaning. It’s a very rich field.

CUMMINGS: It runs all the way from one kind of restaurant sign that has a menu in the window to very kind of precisely painted signs or billboards.

EVANS: Yes. Oh, they’re very important to me. Yes.

CUMMINGS: What is the appeal for you? Do you know why they are important to you?

EVANS: No, I don’t know why. I think in truth I’d like to be a letterer. And then broadly speaking I’m literary. The sign matters are just a visual symbol of writing.

CUMMINGS: That’s interesting. You know, the cohesiveness, the coherence of the exhibition up at Yale – it seems to have an incredible continuity.

EVANS: It does, doesn’t it? Well, you know, that just happened. It was there. We just played it.
It was a lot of work. A lot of it was in, and a lot of it wasn’t in that museum travelling show that’s going around now.

CUMMINGS: Right.

EVANS: And then there are things done since that show.

CUMMINGS: One thing that’s interesting is the size of those prints. Do they all come from the same negative size? What kind of equipment is involved there?

EVANS: No. I have evolved more or less into a Rolleiflex man. That’s two and a quarter format.

CUMMINGS: Do you prefer that over a thirty-five?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Why so?

EVANS: If you handle it right you can make a two and a quarter negative look almost like an eight by ten contact.

You can’t quite do that – or I can’t do it – with a thirty-five millimeter.
It’s an entirely different kind of photography. You do have ground glass to look –

CUMMINGS: Right. Well, in the print do you use the full negative?

EVANS: Not always.

CUMMINGS: Do you crop?

EVANS: I crop if I feel like it. In fact, I don’t like square pictures. I very often find they’re oblong.

CUMMINGS: Are you interested in all the darkroom techniques that one can use?

EVANS: I’m always interested in it but I don’t think it should get out of hand. I think it is dangerous particularly when you’re young to get over-interested in that.

By now I just simply feel that anybody that applies to it should be expected to produce very competent technical work and I go on from there.

CUMMINGS: I notice that in the Yale show, as well as the one at the Museum of Modern Art, that there are no tricks, or apparent tricks that are so easy to do.

EVANS: That again, is a matter of style and taste. I don’t believe in manipulation, if that’s what you mean, of any photographs or negatives.

To me it should be strictly straight photography and look like it; not be painterly ever.

CUMMINGS: Very straightforward printing.

EVANS: Yes. Photographs should be photographic.

CUMMINGS: Yes. But no dodging and all that –

EVANS: Yes. You dodge in printing but it doesn’t show.

You don’t manipulate the negative any other way; you don’t touch the negative. You just dodge; that’s all.

CUMMINGS: You’ve never gotten very involved with color photography, have you?

EVANS: I’ve done it but I don’t approve of it very much. I’ve done it on occasion.

CUMMINGS: Why don’t you approve of it?

EVANS: Because I don’t think color is true yet. I also don’t think it needs it. And it isn’t permanent either.

CUMMINGS: Have you gotten interested in motion pictures ever?

EVANS: Yes. Too late for me to be into it. That would have required be to be a director. But then you had to go ahead to Hollywood and fight those awful producers.

There was nothing to do about that. They didn’t know what they were doing. They were too commercial. That was before the independent producer and director came along.

I’m very interested in films. I never got anywhere near making them. I’d like to have done…. Well, I did teach myself to make films, yes, but it was a matter of making a film to find out what its problems are in dealing in motion as against still photography.

You learn that a film is made in the cutting room.

CUMMINGS: It’s quite a different way of thinking.

EVANS: Oh, yes.

CUMMINGS: Could we make some contrasts between the Museum of Modern Art show of 1938 and the one in 1971? Do you think there is a great deal of change and shift in your work between those years?

EVANS: Well, no, that museum show – Oh! You’re talking about 1938?

CUMMINGS: Right – as opposed to the recent one.

EVANS: Oh, there was some development, yes. But I don’t know that I can put my finger on it particularly. I believe that basically I have the same vision so to speak; I hope richer and more developed. I’m sure it is more mature.

CUMMINGS: In the Yale show it’s always hard to remember people in the photographs. There’s the Zanna group, and there were some of the WPA period. But I always think more of buildings and objects, and things like that.

EVANS: I guess so, yes. You get the impression that there are more objects.

CUMMINGS: Yes.

EVANS: And interiors.

CUMMINGS: Right. And interiors. Is there a reason why?

EVANS: No, I don’t think there’s any reason for that.

CUMMINGS: It’s just a preference in selection?

EVANS: Well, I do feel that I like to suggest people sometimes by their absence.
I like to make you feel that an interior is almost inhabited by somebody.

CUMMINGS: Well, you must get a sense like the one of Mary Frank’s studio. You get a sense of a person being there and a live, active place.

EVANS: Yes. Also that’s in my mind to do that. Yes.

CUMMINGS: You’re not really interested in photographing people in the way you are buildings or something, are you? Even in a Chicago street group it seems more of a pattern than –

EVANS: Well, I’m not interested in people in the portrait sense, in the individual sense. I’m interested in people as part of the pictures and as themselves but anonymous.

I really disapprove of photographing celebrities or known beauties. I do it every once in a while but I think it’s – I can’t quite put my finger on it but I don’t feel right doing that.

CUMMINGS: What is there about it that you -?

EVANS: Well, I don’t think you’re really getting at it – I don’t think a photographic portrait is true. Well, the worst of it is something like Karsh. But even a portrait man is doing something that is a false situation to begin with.

And also the business of photographing celebrities is too easy. Anybody can do that. I’m always embarrassed when Cartier comes out with Sartre or Matisse or something like that. He shouldn’t do that.

That doesn’t take any – you just get the celebrity ready-made in front of you, push the button, and you’ve got something everybody wants to see. It’s much too easy to do.

CUMMINGS: Oh, I see. It’s just you don’t really even think about it.

EVANS: No.

CUMMINGS: The subject will carry the whole thing.

EVANS: Sure. Sure. It can’t miss. I’ve done it every once in a while because I’ve been asked to. I’m going to do Leon Edel next week. His new book on James is coming out.

Now this is a challenge and something I do. It’s a professional and economic thing to do, too. I mean when you have an ideal job like that it’s sort of subheading in a perfectly respectable way that you become independent financially and make your living at.

CUMMINGS: It’s very interesting that you say even somebody like Karsh who sort of imposes his style on anybody – you know, you see a Karsh photograph before you see who it’s a photograph of.

WE: Yes. He’s an embarrassment to us all.

CUMMINGS: But what about some photographers who don’t have such a highly refined or obvious style as that who still do endless rows of celebrities?

EVANS: Well, it’s a whole – I think I just said what I think about it. I don’t regard that as very serious – as a challenge to one’s –

CUMMINGS: But don’t you think it’s possible to document those people in a kind of photograph that - ?

EVANS: It’s almost never done. Yes, I do. I think it should be done but never done that way.
Well, having attacked Cartier, I’ll say that he does it very simply. And those things are valuable.

But I say that anybody can do it. I think it ought to be done, sure. I wish I had done more now.
There are many people that are no longer around that I would like to have photographed. A lot. And just put away.

But I do have a psychological block about it; I probably haven’t analyzed it very much.

I was around Hemingway a little bit but I would never bring out a camera and photograph him, out of regard for him really as too obvious a thing to do. I thought too much of our relationship to throw a camera into it.

CUMMINGS: So that would make some changes then, wouldn’t it?

EVANS: Well, it’s probably pride, too, and ego. My own private ambition comes in there. I don’t want to do the easy thing. I want to do much more difficult things.

CUMMINGS: How did you decide to do that subway riders series?

EVANS: That has a great deal to do with portraiture. That’s my idea of what a portrait ought to be, anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind, not of a celebrity, not journalism.

CUMMINGS: So it’s really kind of unposed?

EVANS: You see, that raises journalism. The moment you do somebody at an editor’s request or because that person is famous you’re doing journalism.

CUMMINGS: Oh, I see.

EVANS: And the trick there is knowing the people who getting done not doing the picture at all.

CUMMINGS: Yes. But also the subway series is unposed. I mean there’s somebody reading, or looking, or kind of off in his own head somewhere. You don’t get the feeling that they’re aware they’re being photographed.

EVANS: Well, they aren’t. They’re not. No, I arrange that. I figure out a means of arranging it by going at a certain season of the year when you can wear a topcoat and sort of half hide the camera under it, going at a time of day when the subway isn’t too crowded, figuring out the lighting and all that.

It was a project for love. It’s value to me – Nobody asked me to do that. Nobody paid me for doing it.

CUMMINGS: Are a lot of your photographs done that way for those reasons?

EVANS: Sure. Well, yes. I’m very non-commercial, rather fiercely so. I’m mad at commercial people. I get into terrible fights.

Even recently Life in its insidious way sent people up to give seminars at Yale. I was up in arms about it because I knew it was a very corrupt thing to do.

They would do some talent-hunting on the side and also show these boys they aren’t living. That made me furious. They were using Yale. Yale is so innocent they let them do that.

CUMMINGS: They want to make a trade school out of it.

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Are there other photographers whose work you’re interested in?

EVANS: Oh, sure.

CUMMINGS: I mean recent ones?

EVANS: Yes, but I usually answer that by saying that a photographer – an artist isn’t very good at judging his contemporaries and shouldn’t even try.
I do like certain people that I’m interested in and I like their work. But even naming them is sometimes insidious or lopsided.

CUMMINGS: Yes, but still I’m curious because there are some people whose work you can look at and make assumptions about what their other interests are; and sometimes it’s accurate. But I find it very difficult to figure out which photographers you would be interested in.

EVANS: Oh! Do you really?

CUMMINGS: Yes.

EVANS: Well, naturally I’m interested in photographers whose work is similar to mine in style. Not that they copy it but develop from it.

Both Fred and Frank are men who’ve taken the kind of approach I have and carried it on further. That’s why I’m very interested in them. They’re both friends of mine, too. I’ve befriended them.

And I have a lot of respect for them. But they’re no longer the younger kids.
There are lots of very talented kids who are still nameless who are working non-commercially very well. Some of the students of mine and others I meet.

CUMMINGS: What do you think of the development of the galleries now that handle photographs, like Witkin and some of the others? There’s a new one called Light.

EVANS: I don’t know about that. It’s got a sign. I think it’s rather shaky. I don’t know whether it’s going to work or not. But they’ve done something. I sell photographs from the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery.

CUMMINGS: Yes. Has Robert done well during your exhibition.

EVANS: Fairly. I mean he never lost money on it. I don’t think he’s done well, no. In fact, neither he nor I have gotten rich on it. But even considering rent and his assistants and all that, he’s not lost money on it.

CUMMINGS: I mean, say, compared to ten or fifteen years ago, do you find that more people are collecting photographs?

EVANS: Yes. More do. They didn’t do it at all then to speak of.

CUMMINGS: That’s interesting. Are there many people that you know who’ve collected your photographs over a period of time other than, say, the Museum of Modern Art?
EVANS: I don’t think there are any large collections, not privately. You know, I have sets of pictures at Eastman House, or at the Smithsonian, or at Chicago –

CUMMINGS: I was thinking about individuals who might over the years have bought things with some re-occurring frequency.

EVANS: Armand Crane is a big collector of things that have to do with me and he’s got a lot of prints of mine. He’s sort of nutty on the subject and he embarrasses me.

I don’t know how to say how or why. I don’t understand his compulsion. Well, he is a collector and I believe his interest is half egotistical and his pride for collecting has not purely to do with the pictures. It’s just the lore or other things.

CUMMINGS: One thing I’d like to talk about is what you’ve been doing at Yale and what your feelings about teaching photography are, and how much can you teach, and how much can’t you teach?

EVANS: I went to Yale skeptically. Jack Tworkov called up and said, “Do you want to be a visiting critic?” I said, “I don’t know what it is. I’ll investigate it. What is it?” I got up there and found that I wasn’t expected to do much except look at some work and criticize it. So I undertook it at Yale.

Then I discovered that it was more than that, but it was more rewarding too, and that the project with the students was an unexpectedly very rich thing for me to go into. Rich for me. For a self-made teacher – I’m not much of a teacher – but I’ve had some effect on the boys and it’s been great for me ever since. I’ve done it for six or seven years now.

CUMMINGS: I think before you said that you really don’t teach them technical things, that you kind of talk about attitudes and ideas. How technical might you get, though, in a discussion?

EVANS: I’m teaching a very advanced course, the most advanced course at Yale. I assume that anybody who gets to me is on top of technique and has mastered it. I require that. Some of them more than others.

Well, if something is bad I’ll say so, I’ll criticize it, in fact rather severely. They complain. But otherwise they don’t pay much attention to it.

CUMMINGS: So you really spend your time talking about their eye and their vision and their - ?

EVANS: Yes. It’s the seeing that I’m talking about. Oh, yes.

CUMMINGS: How much of that do you think one can develop in somebody, though? Do you think there’s a certain predilection and a direction?

EVANS: You can develop that, sure. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it. I’m sure you can. You can help develop it – stimulate, encourage, criticize, correct.
The less direct teaching the better for their development. Which is kind of an art to do.

CUMMINGS: I don’t know – it’s hard to – I’m driving at something here and I can’t really find the question – but – what are the kinds of things you might tell a student, you know, looking at his work, for instance?

EVANS: On the lowest level I would tell him he’s on the wrong path, or that he hasn’t seen the thing properly, or felt it properly or well. I don’t do too much of that, because, as I say, I have sympathetic and very advanced people who are budding artists. That’s what I’m interested in.

And the other side of it, which is more elevated that that, is, oh, admit that he might relate the subject at hand to literature or to films or music or anything else that’s much larger.

I sometimes just play with ideas that have nothing to do with the matter in order to stimulate an interest. I would talk, let’s say, about the relation, and illustrate it, between, let’s say, some great piece of writing and photography.
There’s no book but what’s full of photography. James Joyce is. Henry James it. That’s a pet subject of mine – how those men are unconscious photographers.

CUMMINGS: In what way?

EVANS: In the way they see.

CUMMINGS: Yes. That’s interesting. You mean their imagery?

EVANS: Yes. Joyce was one of the first. As you know, in his Ulysses he was one of the first realists, and simple direct kind of men whose language – he was partly a reporter. Photography is reporting, too.

CUMMINGS: It’s interesting that you keep saying things like reporting and journalism is not as good; portraiture is a problem, and all this. You know, there are so many problems you wonder –

EVANS: There are. I’m interested in reporting, but I also think that reporting at its worst is journalism.But Hemingway was a hell of a good reporter and was always grounded in that and did it to begin with.

CUMMINGS: So it’s getting more than just the obvious is what reporting comes down to?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Could you describe in some kind of terms what makes a good photograph for you? I mean if you look at ten photographs what are the qualities that you would look for to kind of separate them?

EVANS: Detachment, lack of sentimentality, originality, a lot of things that sound rather empty. I know what they mean. Let’s say, “visual impact” may not mean much to anybody. I could point it out though.

I mean it’s a quality that something has or does not have. Coherence. Well, some things are weak, some things are strong. You just have to…. Well, if you’ve got something in front of you and you’ve got some students you throw those words around and point them out.

CUMMINGS: What would visual impact be? Would that be the way the photograph is taken?

EVANS: I purposely took that because it is a vague phrase. To me there are varying degrees of that in the picture. Sometimes it may be that that isn’t the quality you want.

It’s important that – I can show you a picture that’s strong in it, and one that’s weak in it. Well, just like all these qualities that…. A man that’s interested in theatre may say, “That isn’t theatre,” or “That isn’t good theatre.” I often say that in photography. Or that it’s too pictorial; that’s another thing I’m against.

These are words that you throw around to make your students interested and make them come alive.

CUMMINGS: I guess it’s like everything else. People say yes or no and the more times they say yes the longer it’s going to exist.

EVANS: What was that, again?

CUMMINGS: Well, people decide, you know, between, say, ten photographs. The ones that more people say yes about the chances are will exist in some way for a longer period.

EVANS: Well, again to return to teaching: Experience is very important. It comes only with time.
I have time behind me so I venture to teach and say to students, “I don’t really know a hell of a lot more than you do except I’ve been around longer and I do have experience and if I can articulate it some of it will rub off and do you some good.”

When I didn’t have experience that’s one thing I learned, that I needed it. It comes – talking to an experienced man is something; it’s not the same as having it but it’s better than not.

CUMMINGS: Is this the experience of just living, or the experience of working in photography?

EVANS: Everything.

CUMMINGS: Everything. The total combination. Yes.

EVANS: Well, if you’re sixty-five years old and you’ve tested a whole lot of things and a lot of them have gone wrong you know that certain things have value and you know where the value is likely to be found by experience.

When you’re only thirty you don’t know enough to be sure what you’re doing. Or particularly if you’re only twenty.

I can give a very good example of that: That boy working for the Yale News went to that show at Yale and he missed the point. He would say, “This is wonderful photography. Evans is at his worst when he tried to do a gimmick, which is putting up these signs.” Well, that’s missing the whole point. That isn’t gimmick at all. That’s the nugget of that show.

CUMMINGS: How would you describe the point of using those?

EVANS: I did when I’m talking about that sentence in Proust, that sentence in the Proust review. The psychological truth in the relation between the documentary and the fictional is suggested. I can’t name it myself but one is calling attention to the fact that there is a psychological truth there.

And Proust did that, pointed that out. He was one of the first writers who did consciously. Now I think Tolstoy brought it up , maybe Pushkin before him, in literature when he dropped the literacy and began to write the vernacular language instead of the literacy language. And that gave forth to what is called both Naturalism and Realism.

These are all old words but they didn’t exist before those men. I’m told as a matter of literary history that Tolstoy got it out of Pushkin but to me Tolstoy was the first man that spelled it out. He wasn’t writing verse for one thing; he was writing really almost journalistic prose. War and Peace may be an historical novel but it’s just related as though it happened.

Aesthetically they both justified and vindicated even to myself. And that is that forty years ago when I was going around with a camera I was doing some things that I myself thought were too plain to be works of art.

I began to wonder – I knew I was an artist or wanted to be one – but I was wondering whether I really was an artist. I was doing such ordinary things that I could feel the difference. But I didn’t have any support.

Most people would look at those things and say, “Well, that’s nothing. What did you do that for? That’s just a wreck of a car or a wreck of a man. That’s nothing. That isn’t art.” They don’t say that anymore.

CUMMINGS: You’ve prevailed.

EVANS: Yes – prevailed.

CUMMINGS: What do you think has happened? Just the fact that you’ve been able to continue doing this and people have looked and looked and looked and finally they can see?

EVANS: Oh, I think what happened was that I was working beyond my means, beyond myself. I didn’t know that I was as valuable as I was.

I was led to believe that artists are something like mediums anyway, many of them. Many of them don’t know what they’re doing.

CUMMINGS: It drives them more than otherwise.

EVANS: Yes. Sure. I’m an instance of that. And that’s wonderful to me to think that such a thing is true.

CUMMINGS: But do you feel a change in your work, or a sense of continuity or development? Or does it just keep happening?

EVANS: It keeps happening. I don’t think very much about it. I’ve reached a point now, as a body of work is sometimes written about.

I’m always amazed at what people read into it. And I don’t know that I trust the people that write it. But I’m glad to see it taken seriously. I wouldn’t take it apart that way.

CUMMINGS: Is there anyone who’s written about your work that you agree with or find provocative?

EVANS: Sure. Lincoln Kirstein was very prophetic. His 1938 essay put me down prophetically.
As I say, he’s a brilliant mind, a brilliant man. He foresaw what I was doing. In fact, he taught me a lot about what I was doing.

CUMMINGS: In what way?

EVANS: Just by seeing and articulating. He’s a very articulate man with a wonderful eye.

CUMMINGS: Has there been anyone subsequent to him, any recent people who -?

EVANS: Agee was very good about me. Very perceptive. And about photography.
George Leighton who dropped dead was an unknown… He was a Harper’s magazine editor. He had a great eye for photography. He knew what was good. Although he wasn’t sure about what was art, he knew what was true.

CUMMINGS: How do you differentiate there?

EVANS: George Leighton was a brilliantly penetrating fellow and a marvelous photographic editor. But I always kidded him for what I call phillistinism.

I’d say to him, “You don’t know a poem when you see one.” He used to be very good but he wouldn’t see the poetry in a thing of mine.

It has yet to have its critical master who sets up an unassailable scale of values. Sparks fly off so they like Kirstein’s book. He doesn’t do a body of thought through criticism. It doesn’t exist they way it does for music and literature and painting.

CUMMINGS: Do you think that will happen?

EVANS: Well, it’s about time, yes. It might happen right now. I wonder. It may not. If it’s going to, now is the time.
Well, something is brewing. And a whole wave of these talented kids are doing it for love. Somebody is going to…. I’ve met a few students who might be articulate about it, too.

CUMMINGS: It’s interesting that, you know, frequently you refer to love, and one gets the feeling that affection is more important than business in the sense of the attitude toward one’s work. Is that true with you?

EVANS: Sure. Oh, gosh, yes.

CUMMINGS: You know, you’ve never used photography to make up a great career with studios and assistants and all of this other –

EVANS: No, no, not at all. Nor am I forever making it a business. I think that would go against what I’m trying to do.

CUMMINGS: Do you think there have been very good photographers who have gotten lost in that?

EVANS: Oh, yes. I think so. I think it’s very dangerous for anybody.
Even Cartier who has a bit of poetry, every once in a while gets lost in journalism and the business of setting up one of those associations of journalists whose services are for sale and all that.

CUMMINGS: Oh, like Magnum and –

EVANS: Yes, Magnum. I would never go near anything like that. Yes, he has to make a living and I don’t disdain that. I think you should.

CUMMINGS: Do you think that the life that people were living in the 1930s was a great influence on you and how you see things? Do you think that that period in history affected your way of looking in a sense so starkly and directly?

EVANS: I wonder. I don’t know. It might. But I just don’t know whether that can be answered clearly.
There’s a tangential remark to be made, though, and that is: I think that a depression is rather good for some kinds of artists; me included. It took away the temptation to be commercial and go into business. There wasn’t any business.

Time Incorporated was the only place you could go and I didn’t go there during the Depression. Some of my friends did.

CUMMINGS: So you think that that time gave you the opportunity to think more about the aesthetics of --?

EVANS: Yes. It gave you leisure. There just was leisure that didn’t exist for certain individuals in boom times. Weaker kinds of people get sucked into booms so that’s all they do. They just boom along. They’re in it. There’s a detachment that an artist mush have.

CUMMINGS: Are there any people besides the few like Agee and Crane and Kirstein who you think have been an influence on your work?

EVANS: Personally? Oh, yes. Hemingway was a great influence on my work; quite aside from the fact that I knew him slightly.
I was just thinking the other day how important he was. He isn’t so much now, as you know. These kids don’t read Hemingway.

His whole personality, way of thinking and speaking stamped a lot of us. What about you? Didn’t he stamp you somewhat?

CUMMINGS: No, I didn’t read him very much.

EVANS: That’s interesting. How old are you? You told me once.

CUMMINGS: Thirty-eight.

EVANS: Yes. Oh, he was very important to us. He was our Byron; even more than that.

CUMMINGS: In what way “more?”

EVANS: I don’t suppose Byron influenced a whole generation or established a style to the extent that Hemingway did.

CUMMINGS: His style of living as well as working?

EVANS: Yes, and acting and thinking. Fame was very bad for him. He couldn’t stand it really.

CUMMINGS: Oh really!

EVANS: Oh, I think so. I think it tore him apart. I think it ruined him. He wasn’t seeking it even.
Adulation is a handmaiden of fame. And fame is very bad – it’s bad for anybody – it was quite bad for him. It was ruinous for him. Instead of using it, it used him.

He began to play a part, which is a false thing to do; even though it was his own part.

CUMMINGS: It wasn’t, real?

EVANS: No.

End of Interview - Side 2]

Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Rare Walker Evans interview 1971 (part 2 of 3)

2010-12-30T09:07:00.006Z

Following the first part of my post, here's part 2 of the rare Walker Evans interview from 1971.

In this part, the following topics are discussed:

photographing architecture
support from Lincoln Kirstein
early gallery shows
experience at Yale University as a teacher
thoughts on photography as an art
respectability of photography (vs. other established arts)
feelings about gallery shows & the art 'establishment'
working at Fortune magazine

CUMMINGS: This is Side 2. Anyway, well, so photographing the houses was kind of a coincidental commission, right?

EVANS: Oh, yes-s. You know, that’s something I wouldn’t have done myself. It was interesting chiefly because of Kirstein and it was a perfectly respectable thing to do, that is, documenting architecture. And it taught me a lot.

In fact, it introduced me to a knowledge of how to appreciate and love and respond to various kinds of architecture and architectural styles.

I had had a natural attraction to architecture but no experience. And this gave me a certain sophistication. I was always interested in architecture and in the way buildings looked.

But that was as far as it went. I think that came from my father who was a frustrated architect. He wanted to be an architect. And his family fell apart and couldn’t give him that expensive education. It costs like hell to train an architect.

CUMMINGS: Right. Had your father talked about architecture at home then?

EVANS: Apparently, yes. I think, I remember that he did. He used to build things. I mean he’d take it out by building a doll’s house for his children.

I remember a very well-done, elaborate, perfectly done doll’s house. He had a great sense of structure; and he had taste, too; conservative but good.

CUMMINGS: What about the photographs you were taking during the thirties? Did you have a specific set of ideas or theory about them? Or did you just go out and kind of work and develop?

WALEKR EVANS: I was working by instinct but with a sense – not too clear – but a firm sense that I was on the right track, that I was doing something valuable and also pioneering aesthetically and artistically. I just knew it.

And Kirstein helped me a lot. He used to tell me what I was doing. I really learned a lot from him. He was a very perceptive critic and esthete. Oh, yes.

CUMMINGS: Was there anybody else who was as involved with your photographs as he was, or as perceptive?

EVANS: Well, lots of people were. But they didn’t do much, nor were they as perceptive. Oh, God, there were a lot of people. Well, Hart Crane was excited; he picked that up and he showed it around.

It went from friend to friend, you see. In fact, there was a sort of well-to-do young Harvard esthete who had a little gallery that he was paying for.

He gave me an exhibition very early, the first exhibition I had of photographs. Imagine that! They got around. I had a little following. It grew.

CUMMINGS: Did people collect photographs at that time?

EVANS: No. Never thought of that. Well, yes, Julien Levy tried to start a gallery for photographs. It didn’t work. He started one and gave me an exhibition.
But we didn’t sell; one or two prints, that’s all. Which wasn’t enough. It didn’t pay.

CUMMINGS: Did you do commission jobs for people?

EVANS: Yes. Anything I could scrape up. Everything. Freelance. A couple of windfalls. Not very much. In fact, I was usually broke and in debt.

CUMMINGS: You received a Guggenheim Foundation grant?

EVANS: Yes, I did. I applied for that several times before I got it. I used to get refused; then I’d got back, and I got it.

CUMMINGS: What did you do with it?

EVANS: Almost nothing. I paid my debts I think. God, I thought I was going somewhere, and I did so somewhere, I’ve forgotten where now. But it wasn’t much.

I was married – or anyway I wasn’t single – I’ve forgotten whether I was officially married or not at that time. I remember going somewhere. I remember renting – subletting a little apartment.

We had to go somewhere. But I don’t remember where we went. I guess we went on a trip, but not abroad.

CUMMINGS: Just toured the country?

EVANS: I was so behind financially that I couldn’t do very much. This was just something that got me out of jail. It often happens that a Guggenheim just saves somebody’s life; it doesn’t subsidize it.

CUMMINGS: Right.

EVANS: Or artists have children on a Guggenheim. They do a lot of things besides art.

CUMMINGS: Yes, that’s true. Some artist went and bought a very expensive car.

EVANS; Yes. I remember a story – I don’t know whether it’s true or not – that Noguchi did something quite different from what he said he was going to do and somebody was incensed about that.

CUMMINGS: Well, he would do something like that.

EVANS: Yes. And yet I thought very highly of the Guggenheim Foundation in those days. They had a very impressive list.

CUMMINGS: Oh, it’s incredible.

EVANS: Gosh. What an influence on American art at the time. That’s all Henry Allen Moe. I give him credit for it. When you look that over you must take you hat off to Henry Moe.

CUMMINGS: Yes. He’s an incredible mind behind all those --

EVANS: And maybe behind a lot more that he wants known. He has his finger in everything.

CUMMINGS: Yes. Oh, I know. What about James Soby who came along somewhere in the thirties, didn’t he?

EVANS: Ah, yes. Kirstein did, I think, put me onto Soby; or him onto me. Soby got interested in photography and wanted to study it and Kirstein said, “Get Evans to give you some lessons.” That’s what happened.

He had me up to his house in West Hartford to teach him. I stayed there for a week.

CUMMINGS: Was he a good student?

EVANS: No, he gave it up. He’s written about that. He sensed that he wasn’t going to do it right. So he didn’t do it.

CUMMINGS: You had no interest in teaching or anything at that point, did you?

EVANS: I did teach a little bit privately but only for the money. No, I didn’t have an interest in teaching per se.

CUMMINGS: That’s only a recent activity?

EVANS: Yes. When I first asked to go to Yale I though: I don’t know if this is right for me or not. But when I tried it, to my great surprise I found that is offered me something.

Well, really being in touch with college students is what it meant to me. I didn’t know I was going to get rewarded for that. I thought I might not even like it. But the fact is I love it.

CUMMINGS: How long have you been there now?

EVANS: I’ve been there six years.

CUMMINGS: Really?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Has it changed a great deal in that time?

EVANS: Yes, it has changed quite a lot. Yes. Another side of the reward to me is the self-satisfaction of seeing that it is successful with the students. They like it. They get something out of me.

And they report that just sort of by the grapevine. And that’s why I’m renewed there.

The University knows that I have an effect on the student. It’s immeasurable but it’s there.

CUMMINGS: Do you have students who want to become professional photographers?

EVANS: Yes. I discourage them. I don’t want to make photographers out of them.

I just show them what art is. If it rubs off that’s about all. I don’t even claim to be a teacher.

I claim to be an experienced man and ready to expose myself to them and let some of the experience rub off. That’s all. They need that.

CUMMINGS: You must have a very flexible kind of teaching program then?

EVANS: Oh, sure. It’s loose as hell. I do exactly as I please. We talk about everything under the sun – films, music, literature, anything. I showed you that postcard.

CUMMINGS: Right.

EVANS: That’s from a student four years ago. He had a lot of fun. So he’s my friend now. He sends me a postcard from wherever he is.

CUMMINGS: Going back to the chronology here in the thirties, what kind of cameras and things were you interested in? Did you have a specific kind of equipment?

EVANS: I’ve always been interested in cameras. I’m even interested – well, I was interested a little bit too much even in the technique of photography. It’s a fascinating thing.

But it hasn’t much to do with art and an artist had better stay away from it, not get absorbed in it. It’s too absorbing.

CUMMINGS: Oh yes, there are endless darkroom tricks.

EVANS: Oh yes, you can do all kinds of tricks. It’s just better not to. I am after mastery of what I want to do; that is, I want to be able to do what I want to do, and do it well. And I insist on that even in teaching.

I say, “You’ve got to know what you’re doing and be on top of it and do it well.There’s no excuse not to know the technique well.”

But I don’t teach the technique. I say you should go out and do it somehow or other, get it yourself. There are technical teachers over there.

CUMMINGS: Oh; that teach them developing and how to read light meters and all that?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: What about the idea – we keep coming back to the term the “art.” How do you define the art in photography? Or what is the quality that’s being defined?

EVANS: Yes. How do you define it in anything?

CUMMINGS: Yes.

EVANS: You define it in photography the same way you do in painting or literature or whatever it is. Nobody does it convincingly, that is, exclusively.

But you know perfectly well that in writing on aesthetics and in art criticism there are some very profound and satisfactory treatises by this or that person that is the essence of criticism.

Photography is very weak in that. There isn’t any in photography to speak of.

CUMMINGS: What do you think are the qualities that, say, differentiate fine art photography from commercial photographers? Is it the way they look at things? Their attitude? What they photograph?

EVANS: I’ll preface my answer by a remark that has come to me lately – I’ve been thinking about it – In my time, let’s say, in the thirties or when I was moving into this thing, it so happened that very few men of taste, education, or even just general sophistication, or any kind of educated mind, ever touched photography. Nobody ever says that very much.

But that has a lot to do with the history of photography. And the fact that quite a few people of real discrimination, taste, and general superior critical minds have come into it.

We don’t often talk about how damn few superior minds were ever in it. Also it was disdained medium. It was laughed at, and misused and corrupted by everybody.

I mean my poor father, for example, who had a conventional attitude toward all the arts and all that decided that all I wanted to do was to be naughty and get hold of girls through photography, that kind of thing. He had no idea that I was serious about it. And respectable, educated people didn’t.

That was a world you wouldn’t go into. Of course that made it all the more interesting, the fact that it was perverse, for me.

That was one reason I was able to do something because I did have an eye and a mind and hardly anybody else did and I was working with a camera. That’s all.

I did something that was not trite or vulgar.

CUMMINGS: Why do you think so few sophisticated people were attracted to photography until recently.

EVANS: Gosh, I do not know. I’d love to know why, too, I’m sure. I think maybe it was just that it got a bad name for itself.

You ask yourself why a girl has to be careful of her reputation. And you ask that a little bit and you begin to see why it’s damn important. A wrong reputation can ruin a girl.

Well, this art had a wrong reputation. It was dubious and not accepted by the respectable Establishment mind. That makes a hell of a lot of difference.

CUMMINGS: Do you think that the same people though would look at, say, a photograph used in an ad in a different way than they would look at a photograph not made for commercial purposes? Or would they never differentiate?

EVANS: I don’t think they would look at it at all or think about it at all. I just think they would consider it a low thing.

Well, just as many fields have an undeserved low standing and reputation in the world. That’s one of the delights and one of the sadnesses of working life.

Well, look at the long Puritan disdain for, and fear of the theater. Let’s say, for a respectable young girl to go to the theater there was quite a fight. Or even, hell, for women to practice any art was a bad thing.

If you were a genteel South Carolina debutante you couldn’t, for instance, be a writer. Judy Peterkin did break that and brave it. She was misunderstood by her husband. He didn’t think she ought to be writing a book.

But let’s go back to where we were. Or where were we? Talking about photography I guess. Of course there’s quite a turnover now. It isn’t thorough. But this is an age of breakthrough about photography unpredicted to me. I never expected it to happen.

CUMMINGS: I notice in the galleries that show photographs and the museums way they do a photographic exhibition that they are jammed with young people.

EVANS: Yes. Well, do you know why? I’ve figured it out and I think this is the case: They’re after – God bless them, it’s a good thing to their credit – they’re after truth and honesty.

The camera seems to be one of the tools that will produce that. They feel it.

Now I may be wrong about that. Now I’ve seen how you can be very perverse and superficial and dishonest with a camera. But they don’t think so.

They think that it’s honest. I believe that’s the explanation for this. There’s quite a wave.

I keep coming back to this – let’s say, Hilton Kramer did a very important thing – I think he made what will be art history by hailing that show of mine and saying in the New York Times, “If you don’t realize the importance, of contemporary photography of this sort, you’re missing something and you’re ignorant. Wake up.”

He got very militant about that. It was the first time it was said by an authority in an important place and that made a hell of a lot of difference.

CUMMINGS: That was the second time you’d had a show at the Museum of Modern Art, wasn’t it?

EVANS: Yes. But earlier there wasn’t any Kramer to say, “This is high art.” I’d always had a small acceptance earlier. I mean I was already accepted by a small bunch of experts.

But this put, not necessarily me – it isn’t as personal as that – it put the kind of thing I’m doing in photography in a place – it’s almost religion – where it deserved serious consideration.

CUMMINGS: How would you compare the reaction from the first show there to the recent one?

EVANS: It was smaller, that’s all. There was very favorable reaction to the first one. And chiefly I think Kirstein’s essay to the book was in essence a catalogue itself.

That essay was a very bright piece of art criticism. And that’s history-making too I think. But still it’s an art book for a very small public.

This other thing, Kramer hailing it in the Times, and the show going across the country does make it a national event. I’ll bet you it’s forming right now – I bet you it’s a point in art history as far as photography is concerned.

CUMMINGS: What kind of reaction do you get from the exhibition?

EVANS: All kinds really. Things are happening all over the place about it. Well, there’s been quite a press in each place – of course the local papers, variously sometimes.
Embarrassingly, sometimes stupid.

Boston, of all places that they allow in one of their papers to have a show like that reviewed as a social event and describe what the trustees wives were wearing at the opening.

That kind of thing is laughable if you don’t weep.

CUMMINGS: Yes. What reaction do you have when you walk in and see, you know, a survey of years of work all up on the wall?

EVANS: Well, it makes me dizzy. I also get embarrassed and emotional. And since I’m the kind of man I am – I’m not very good with my emotions – I probably run away from them.

But actually I probably feel like weeping to see this thing in a museum like that because it all means a lot to me privately.

After all, art is an emotional thing. I’ve stated that. It’s a matter of feeling, not thinking.

CUMMINGS: I generally ask people that because the reactions are always quite different.

EVANS: I’ll bet you they are. Well, I say to myself look here, keep your cool, don’t get excited by this or anything else. I say that when I’m beginning to get excited. I lose my head; I’d go raving around screaming and weeping if I didn’t look out. So when I feel like doing that I’ll become damn cool. Which is false, of course.

Then I’m having an imposed reaction that isn’t true at all. That’s an Anglo-Saxon straight way to live. And they invented that in order to survive danger I suppose. That has happened to me several times where Anglo-Saxon cool has saved a danger situation.

That’s how it developed I guess. I used it once when I was invaded, I mean my apartment was broken into in a scary way. Each time I used by head because I kept cool.

CUMMINGS: What has changed the most, do you think, in your attitude toward photography over the years?

EVANS: Well, don’t forget I’m getting older. I’m doing things that I would have looked upon with some disdain as a young man. When you’re thirty you say: I will never become that, or do that. And then you do.

Of course when you’re thirty you don’t understand why anybody at age sixty-eight does certain things. When you become sixty-eight you know damn well why they do it.

CUMMINGS: Have you kind of eliminated ideas or experience and developed other ones?

EVANS: No. The chief thing I’ve noticed is a solidifying of purpose and conviction and I’ve gained security about what I’m doing. But also part of me says: beware of this, don’t accept acclaim; be careful about being established.

There’s this problem. How do you get around the Establishment when something is establishing you? You’re established when you’re in these big museums. I find that quite a challenge.

That’s why I’m going to do something with all these things, you find something else, establish that.Part of me doesn’t want this to be established. It shouldn’t be because it tames it.

I think I’m doing something that is not acceptable. To find acceptance is quite a thing.

CUMMINGS: Well, but that always seems to be part of the circle, you know.

EVANS: Yes, it does. And I know enough about it to know what’s going on. I’m fascinated to stand aside and observe this happening and to observe its effect upon myself.

CUMMINGS: Do you find that since you do have exhibitions with Bob Schoelkopf and pictures are sold, that the fact that you’re collected, does that now make a difference? Or is that just kind of a nice thing?

EVANS: It makes a difference in a way; but not much because there isn’t enough, you see. If that meant that I could live well on it – that’s what ought to be – it would make more of a difference. But it doesn’t come to that.

You see, this is just a little extra money. What really matters – money is a very serious matter and what matters is real money. What you live on is very important whether you’re honest or not.

CUMMINGS: Could we go back about the Farm Security Administration or a little while and talk about specific things that you did?

EVANS: Sure. Watch this. We only have five minutes more.

[machine turned off]

CUMMINGS: Were there any particular projects that you wanted to do that you were able to accomplish? Or were you given assignments?

EVANS: Oh. No. By subterfuge I did a whole lot of things on my own which I was determined to do. By “subterfuge” I mean I would ignore bureaucratic orders, administration orders.

I wasn’t going to listen to – I wasn’t going to serve anybody in this position except myself. So I just used it to go off freely and do exactly what came before my eye.

I remember once somebody wanted one of those stupid building projects photographed. I photographed it but I said this is the last time I’m going to do that; I’m not interested in this; to hell with it, I won’t do it.

CUMMINGS: What about 1943 when you joined the Time-Life complex and then went to Fortune two years later? Did you there have enough freedom? Or were you given specific assignments?

EVANS: I had to fight for it. But in a way I accepted that as a challenge. I had to use my wits there. And I think I did all right.

I think I won in the long run. I was very pleased with that because that’s a hard place to win from. That’s a deadly place really, and ghastly. I can’t tell you how horrible that is, that organization.

CUMMINGS: In what way?

EVANS: Well, it’s insidiously corrupt and its values are a hundred percent the opposite of what any aesthetic or idealistic mind can ever conceive. But it’s hypocritical; they do not admit that.

And they play in a horribly dishonest and corrupt way this other game. You know that. The history of “Life” you know, the psychology of Henry Luce all comes from that. It’s a very one-man organization.

CUMMINGS: You did a number of portfolios for them?

EVANS: Yes, I did indeed. And they were mine too. I conceived those and executed them.

CUMMINGS: Did you work on a kind of straight basis or full time or free lance? Was it a regular job?

EVANS: Yes, I was hired by the managing editor. And that’s important. I saw to that so I could go over the head of the arts department. There was no art director for me. I just ignored them, all of them.

I would go to management with my ideas, never telling the art department about it. They were furious about that. But that was what saved me.

CUMMINGS: That must have given you a lot of conflict with the art department?

EVANS: Oh, it did! They hated me. My God, Leone could kill me. But he was a very clever man and knew he shouldn’t fight with me. He just ignored the whole thing.

He knew that I was ignoring him so he was going to ignore me.

CUMMINGS: Are there any of those portfolios that stand out to you as being especially successful or rewarding from your point of view?

EVANS: Oh, yes. Sure. I’m very pleased with some of them.

CUMMINGS: Which ones?

EVANS: Oh. Well, some of them are not even my photography at all. I love the two postcard ones; they’re purely mine. You probably never saw them. Vintage postcards.

[End of Tape 1 – Side 2]

Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Rare 1971 interview with photographer Walker Evans (part 1 of 3)

2010-12-28T17:35:00.003Z

In 1971, Walker Evans gave a lengthy and wide-ranging interview to Paul Cummings, in which he spoke at length about his life and his work.

This interview, also available on the Archives of American Art website, covers so much of Evans life, I've decided to re-present it here in 3 parts.
(Each part posted on this blog corresponds to one side of the original interview tape.)

Part 1, presented here, includes the following topics:

his early family life
his early schooling
college at Andover & Yale
his time in Paris
his early literary ambitions
meeting Alfred Steiglitz (and his infatuation with Georgia O'Keefe!)
early jobs on Wall Street & the New York Public Library
experiences of knowing & working with Lincoln Kirstein & Hart Crane
Ben Shahn (including experience of sharing a studio)
getting work with Roy Stryker at the Farm Security Adminstration

CUMMINGS: It’s October 13, 1971 – Paul Cummings talking to Walker Evans at his home in Connecticut with all the beautiful trees and leaves around today.

It’s gorgeous here. You were born in Kenilworth, Illinois – right?

EVANS: Not at all. St. Louis. There’s a big difference. Though in St. Louis it was just babyhood, so really it amounts to the same thing.

CUMMINGS: St. Louis, Missouri.

EVANS: I think I must have been two years old when we left St. Louis; I was a baby and therefore knew nothing.

CUMMINGS: You moved to Illinois. Do you know why your family moved at that
point?

EVANS: Sure. Business. There was an opening in an advertising agency called Lord & Thomas, a very famous one. I think Lasker was head of it.

Business was just starting then, that is, advertising was just becoming an American profession I suppose you would call it.

Anyway, it was very naïve and not at all corrupt the way it became later. It was just perfectly honest to make a living.

My father could write so he was a copywriter. And evidently got a better job in Chicago.

He bought a home in the suburb of Kenilworth and moved up there. We were two children.

CUMMINGS: Did you have a brother or a sister?

EVANS: A sister, who is older than I.

CUMMINGS: And you went to school –

EVANS: I went to public school in Kenilworth. It was a little suburban town very restricted, all the same kind of people. So everyone in the school was good; everybody went to it. I still remember some of the good teachers there.

CUMMINGS: Really?

EVANS: Yes, a couple of women were fine. The teachers were all women.

CUMMINGS: Do you find that the teachers were important to you at that point?

EVANS: Oh, sure, oh, yes.

CUMMINGS: They opened up the world? Or they closed it up? Or what did they do?

EVANS: It wasn’t only the teachers. For example, there was a women in the town, a remarkable woman who was interested in children and was interested in literature and she got us reading outside of school. I formed my literary taste because of a woman in Kenilworth, Illinois, who used to read to us.

CUMMINGS: Who was she? Do you remember her name?

EVANS: Oh, she was a wonderful woman. Her name was Mrs. Sears – I guess that was her name – no, Mrs. Phelps; yes. Sears founded that little town. It was very English. He was English. It was an English green town, that kind of thing. It still exists, the plan, you know, curving streets and English names and all that kind of thing.

Of course it had its drawbacks socially speaking. I didn’t know it but I was only seeing privileged people with a certain amount of money and security. It was sort of a Babes in Toyland fairyland.
I didn’t know what the real world was like at all. We weren’t taken to the Chicago slums or anything like that.

CUMMINGS: How did you meet this Mrs. Phelps? Was she involved with the school? Or was she a friend of the family?

EVANS: Everybody knew everybody in the town. Oh, sure. They were all the same kind of people. And as I look back upon it, she was great.

With love and intelligence, love of people and children, and intelligence, and knowledge and love of literature she just opened us up to it without our knowing it.

CUMMINGS: What kind of things did you read then?

EVANS: I must say that I don’t remember much about that. It was just that reading as an idea, as a concept, as a joy which led to a knowledge of what literature is, world literature is very important. It made me literate and articulate. But for that children grow up without that after all.

But on the other hand I had literate parents with books at home and reading there. They read to me too. I just happen to remember this particular woman who was a literary woman more than my parents were.

Although my father was a professional hack writer, he wasn’t literary the way this woman was.

CUMMINGS: What kind of books did you have at home? All sorts?

EVANS: Standard. You know, Dickens, Scott, all the Victorian classical writers. As I look back on it now, the whole education was classical.

Hell, the nursery rhymes that were read to me…. And Robert Louis Stevenson and Ernest Thompson Seton – I read all that stuff. And then later on the Rover Boys and the Motor Boys and –

CUMMINGS: Everything.

EVANS: Oh, sure.

CUMMINGS: Was that a large school that you went to there?

EVANS: No. The little town was only a mile square. They had a tiny school, a wooden building. They built a new one while I was there.

I still remember the event of building a brick school. No, no. I don’t know the population but you can’t have very many people in a spread-out town that extended about one square mile on the lake front.

CUMMINGS: How did your family select…. because you went from there to Loomis?

EVANS: No, no. My father was offered apparently probably a lucrative job in Toledo with the Willys Motor Car Company to do their – to write their advertising – that is, no – that was done by the advertising agency and a Toledo agency drew the Willys account, I don’t know how.

But I know that’s why we went to Toledo. Which of course was a shocking move for me at the age of twelve or something like that. Then to go to a big public school in a big really conglomerate city like that where everything was – well, I had a hard time, a rude time.

CUMMINGS: In what way?

EVANS: Well, I mean just seeing underbred people. I had never seen that before.
Without knowing it, I had been very sheltered seeing nothing but people who were clean and well bred, well-fed, well-educated and well-mannered and all that as a child.

CUMMINGS: So you went to – what? – a large public school?

EVANS: Yes. I even went to the high school for a year in Toledo. That was before I went to boarding school in the East.

CUMMINGS: But you found the town a great shock from - ?

EVANS: Yes. Really Toledo is an industrial town. I was in a pastoral town before that; a suburb really, but what I mean is an imitation, English, pastoral, socially, artificial town.

Toledo was a small city full of immigrants. There were lots of Poles and Italians, and of course Jews and Blacks and all people I had never seen before.

CUMMINGS: How do you think that affected you?

EVANS: I really don’t know. I’m sure it had a profound effect but I don’t know that I can put it into words.

I don’t know that I felt it – I just sense now that that was a shock and probably bad, that is that it must have produced probably a minor psychosis in me; I don’t know what it would be – fear –

CUMMINGS: Yes. The unknown quantity.

EVANS: Yes. Insecurity, too. I was just nobody. In the other town I felt like a lord of the manor. I mean we had a servant and he used to call me “master” and all that sort of thing.

You know, we weren’t well-off, we weren’t rich; but in those days people of moderate means had servants living in the house doing everything for them. Unthinkable now.

CUMMINGS: Yes. You had an early interest in writing, didn’t you?

EVANS: Yes, but that came later. Well, maybe then, yes, I already had because of all that reading with Mrs. Phelps. And I was always writing. I used to write things and hid them, put them away.

CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

EVANS: I’d write in a diary my confessions and descriptions of things I didn’t want anybody to see. I was very secretive.

CUMMINGS: What kind of writing did you do? Was it just little notes, or did you write essays or stories?

EVANS: Oh, I don’t remember that I did much out of school at that time. I always remember that I enjoyed English and was rewarded by always being given the top marks in English. It came easy to me.

And the teachers always said, “This boy can write.” It was said behind my back but I knew they were saying that.

CUMMINGS: Did you have interest in music and other things then, too?

EVANS: Well, no, not so much. Some. That is, I loved it but I wasn’t given any musical education, it wasn’t around.

My mother played piano by ear. All those people were interested in music for light pleasure that’s all.

I knew the scores of La Boheme and Madame Butterfly and Puccini’s other things and all that sort of trivial, schmaltzy music.

CUMMINGS: Were you interested in sports in school?

EVANS: Well, sadly, yes. I longed to be one but never was any good at any one of them, inept.

I could hit a baseball; I had a good eye. I mean naturally I wanted to be a hero, make a touchdown.

I never could come anywhere near doing it. Oh, yes, I had all the desires and dreams for that.

CUMMINGS: How did you come to go to boarding school then?

EVANS: One doesn’t know. It was a decision made by the parents. I do remember finding out about that school because the boy next door went there.

His parents obviously told my parents that there was a school, which was a new school starting up, reasonably priced, and supposed to be reasonably good, so they put me in it.

It was disastrous for me.

CUMMINGS: How so?

EVANS: I just hated it. I quarreled with the headmaster all the time. I was his natural enemy; he was mine. Therefore I didn’t do well.

Finally I practically broke down and left the school; my father took me out after conferring…. They knew I was a misfit, a problem child.

But I do remember my father taking me out and telling the headmaster what was the matter with him, why couldn’t they have taken care of me better than that.

CUMMINGS: How long were you there?

EVANS: Just a year and a few months of the new year I remember.

CUMMINGS: It wasn’t a very large school then?

EVANS: No. I don’t know how many, but anyway it was quite small.

CUMMINGS: That was your first time, your first adventure living away from home, wasn’t it?

EVANS: Well, yes. At that time my mother moved to New York with my sister to put her in a school in New York and took an apartment in New York.
So then I was not going back to Ohio.

I was sort of based in New York. My vacations were spent at my mother’s apartment in New York.

CUMMINGS: What do you think there was about the school besides the headmaster that was so difficult?

EVANS: Well, the whole English Christian gentlemen ethic, the sportsmanship, the high-mindedness, and all that just made a naughty boy out of me and all the rest of it.

Besides that I was more precocious than the rest of the boys in the school. They seemed like a bunch of babies to me. And they bored me.

CUMMINGS: But it’s interesting because it’s such a shift. You’d think it would be easier because of the Kenilworth experience. Ohio changed that?

EVANS: Well, no. I wouldn’t say that exactly. I would just say that I was in the wrong school. I think that my classmates were probably more like Kenilworth than they were Toledo.

I understood them. I knew what their psychology was.

CUMMINGS: But it didn’t make it any easier for you?

EVANS: No. Well, I was evidently running into trouble which I probably don’t understand to this day myself. I don’t even think about it, or used to.

I suppose I was near what is now called a breakdown and need for psychiatry and treatment and all that. But at that time we just rode it out.

CUMMINGS: You spent one summer then in New York City, right?

EVANS: No, we wouldn’t stay there in the summer. We would do to a summer resort, as I remember it. My father always had an eye on me.

He wanted me, for example, not to waste time playing at a summer resort. He wanted me to have a job. And he would get me jobs.

Once he got me a job in an automobile factory.

CUMMINGS: How did that work out?

EVANS: I didn’t do what he wanted me to do. He wanted me to learn what work and money was like. And I didn’t at all. It didn’t take.

It was very well meant. You have to give my father credit for trying.

CUMMINGS: Well, what did it produce, do you think?

EVANS: Well, I really don’t know. I suppose bad things, perversity and frivolity and folly.

CUMMINGS: The opposite side.

EVANS: Yes. I must have learned something. You do; if you’re fifteen whatever is around, some of it, sinks in. I couldn’t put my finger on what the things were.

Well, as a matter of fact, even now I do feel that it’s something for a kid to know what working in a factory is like, what the job holding world is like.

CUMMINGS: So you worked in an automobile factory for a while?

EVANS: Yes. I must say now that I think about it – I haven’t thought about it since then, I’m very glad of that.

You know, one of the only ways to know people in general in a way is to work with them and then you are in the same boat.

I think I was regarded as the gilded, privileged youth, to be sure; a summer out of private school and a job is given as a favor, not as a necessity.

But nevertheless there you were, and you had to make yourself liked by those people and get along with them.
That was good training, yes, sure. There my father did get something.

But I didn’t learn about the value of money and work. I haven’t learned that yet.

CUMMINGS: Well, there’s always something new. What about Andover? Was that, again, a parental choice?

EVANS: No, that was my own choice. And I liked it much better.

CUMMINGS: Oh, really?

EVANS: For some reason or other, I had a romantic idea that that was a great school.

It had a reputation of being one of the oldest and biggest – I suppose I’d read that; I guess I had been reading about the regular sort of Ivy League traditions “Stover at Yale” and all that nonsense and I think they all came out of Andover and liked it. And I wanted to go.
And I walked in.

In those days you could. Then of course I had the naïve assumption that boys have, that they can have anything, that their parents will give to them.

I never thought of the fact that my father had to work to pay for that. I never thought of that for a minute.

CUMMINGS: But that really was an exciting educational experience then?

EVANS: Well, it was a bigger, much more grown-up school.
They let you alone and treated you more intelligently. Gee, that Loomis School was really terrible.

They had no idea of how to treat children, young men. They were insulting, hypocritical, and really degrading; awful.

You didn’t run into that at Andover. Although it was the same thing.

At least they had the sense to leave you alone. They knew that if you went out and got drunk it wasn’t the end of the world.

It was part of your education, too; that kind of thing. I mean they had some sense. Good God.

CUMMINGS: Did you meet many interesting students at Andover?

EVANS: No. No, that was still the football days and the school athlete was the hero.
There were only a few – I had a few companions who were interested in literature, let’s say, or reading and all that.

But we almost had to keep that a secret. That was not done.

CUMMINGS: Did you have any interest in becoming a writer because of this literary influence?

EVANS: I certainly did. Yes, you’re damn right.

Too much of a one; that’s what prevented me from – I was so taken with that and also I had such high standards that I couldn’t put them on paper.

Now I realize that I didn’t have anything to write about, but I didn’t know that was the trouble then.

Anyway I was dismayed by the fact that I couldn’t do it.

CUMMINGS: Did you write a lot of school papers and things?

EVANS: Yes. I also was thought to officially as a good English student.

I used to always get A’s in English without any effort.

CUMMINGS: You went off to Paris at some point after that? Or was that after college?

EVANS: Ah, yes. That’s very important. That was after college – during college – I left college to go to Paris.

CUMMINGS: From Andover you went to Williams? Did you select that, again? Was that your choice?

EVANS: Well, no. I went to Yale and I found that I really wasn’t in.
Most of the Andover boys just walk into Yale. I didn’t have quite enough credits or whatever they call them. Due to an administrative mix up I was allowed to go down there and I think was even given a room.

But I was told by the dean that I wasn’t in, or there were too many what they call conditions or something – in Latin – I don’t know what.

You know, a boy of seventeen or eighteen hasn’t got any sense at all of what he’s doing.

Somebody said that the Dean of Admissions at Williams was an Andover man and “Why don’t you run up there and walk in?” And I did.

Which all was a mad, unintelligent, stupid, undirected thing.

I don’t think that my parents even knew what I was doing or where I was.

CUMMINGS: Were you involved with them? Or were they involved with what you were doing?

EVANS: Well, they were having a lot of trouble with there own lives. I suppose – although they didn’t mean to – I must have felt some neglect. Although I wouldn’t accuse them of neglect.

If they were in confusion that must have been it. You see, I didn’t see much of either of my mother or my father at that time. And I don’t think I felt like turning to them either.

I think I must have been rather alienated.

CUMMINGS: You didn’t go home on holidays and things like that?

EVANS: Yes, I did. Well, I mean I would go home for Christmas vacations, sure, to the New York apartment where my mother was.

CUMMINGS: So you didn’t really have much direct influence from your father, for example?

EVANS: No. I think all parents influence you profoundly; but sometime not in a direct way that you can put your finger on.

I have an idea that you are very much a product of what each of your parents is. I was no exception.

CUMMINGS: How was Williams? You found that an interesting experience?

EVANS: Oh, no. I was bored with Williams. I was still I guess what’s called now a maladjusted young man. I didn’t do well there. I didn’t pay much attention.

Either I was bright enough, or the school was easy enough so that I didn’t have to work academically to be in good standing, to pass, so to speak.

I used Williams very, very positively for reading. Really that was subsidized leisure time to read. I went to the library and read. There was a very good little library.

Somebody had left a good collection of modern first editions I remember. I would discover people like George Moore and I don’t remember who all, and I would sit there reading these things, and neglecting my studies but passing them anyway by listening in class and getting low grades in examinations, you know, gentleman’s C’s.

Do you know what that is?

CUMMINGS: Yes.

EVANS: That’s what I got.

CUMMINGS: But did you still pursue your interest in wanting to become a writer at Williams?

EVANS: Yes. More so even.

There were a few more boys there to read with and discuss books with. I became intensely literary in that one year, yes. But it had almost nothing to do with the English classes in school at all.

It was outside. But just look who was publishing then!

That’s who I was reading: Lawrence, Virginia Woolfe, all those people. I was in the class of 1926. This was taking place in 1922-23.

T. S. Eliot was just coming up.

You can be sure that Williams didn’t teach you those. You had to go and get them. But we did.

CUMMINGS: So you knew what was really modern?

EVANS: You’re damn right. I was right there. I now pride myself on that.

CUMMINGS: Was that through your friends? Or your own discovery?

EVANS: Yes. Both. It always is. These things generate.

I’m fatalistic about it. I think the boys that should know T.S. Eliot as he’s coming up do know him.

CUMMINGS: It’s part of their world.

EVANS: Sure. Exactly.

CUMMINGS: Well, you went off to Paris?

EVANS: I certainly did. Yes.

CUMMINGS: How did that come about? Was that because of your reading about Paris and those places?

EVANS: Oh, sure! I’ll bet you George Moore sent me to Paris. Of course it was. Yes.

There, again, too I just sensed that that was the place. And I was right.

I guess I took advantage of my parents’ distraction, whatever they were going through, and I got that paid for as part of my education.

CUMMINGS: You did audit some classes at the Sorbonne?

EVANS: Oh, sure. I even enrolled, but not for a degree. I enrolled in their classes for foreigners.

I also went to the College de France lectures quite a lot. They were exciting.

I was intensely a Frenchman by that time, and determined not to speak English.
I dressed like a Frenchman even.

CUMMINGS: Where did you go and what happened in Paris? You met lots of people there?

EVANS: No. I was very poor and obscure and quite unhappy and lonely. No, it wasn’t what most people think Paris in the golden age was. Not for me. I didn’t know anybody.

But I was intensely excited about and interested in the ferment. I felt that was a very exciting artistic period in Paris in the twenties. It was in the air. I lived on the Left Bank.

I lived with a student and knew what was going on.

CUMMINGS: Did you know any writers or painters or people on the culture scene?

EVANS: No. You see, I felt very much outside of all that because I was nobody. And I wasn’t doing anything.I was absorbing it all.

The thing that kept me from knowing the Americans was that I was anti-American. I was not fleeing them but I disdained the moneyed, leisured, frivolous, superficial American who didn’t – well, like Scott Fitzgerald.

I wouldn’t have paid any attention to him at all, however famous and successful a writer he was, because he wouldn’t speak French and had materialistic values.

He was in love with the rich. I though this was terrible. I would have nothing to do with it. Also they were older, too. I mean Hemingway was five years older. That’s a lot at that age.

CUMMINGS: Yes, at that point.

EVANS: But I was aware that there were these great people around and people like the Gerald Murphys were entertaining them and all that.

I was in flight from that. I wouldn’t have gone near it.

CUMMINGS: You didn’t go to famous bookstores or anything like that?

EVANS: Oh, yes. I did go to Sylvia’s Beach’s. I used to see James Joyce.

I used to talk to Sylvia. She sensed that I knew my Joyce and she said, “I’ll introduce you to him.”

But I was scared to death to meet him. I wouldn’t do it. He came in and I left the shop.

CUMMINGS: You got into Joyce very early then? – right away.

EVANS: Yeah, sure. During the publication of Ulysses. Yes, I really got in.

He was my god. That, too, prevented me from writing. I wanted to write like that or not at all.

CUMMINGS: You wanted to sort of start at the top and go higher.

EVANS: I think he ruined many a young man. And he was our god to the last man.

We would die for him. Oh, yes, we took that damn seriously. That was literature.

CUMMINGS: Were there any other writers that interested you at that point?

EVANS: Oh, sure, yes. Now as I look back on them they were the conventional classical ones; at that time they were avant-garde and little known.

I read them all of course; passionately. Sure.

CUMMINGS: How long were you in Paris?

EVANS: Two years.

CUMMINGS: And you didn’t get involved with French life very much, or not?

EVANS: A little, but not importantly. I lived purposely with French people.

You know, that’s the regular thing to do; if you were a student at the Sorbonne you could find a pension where you had to speak French. So I did that.

I always ate with and lived with people that took foreign students. Oh, sure; I was always in a French house, two or three different ones.

CUMMINGS: Did you get to know other students?

EVANS: Oh, yes.

CUMMINGS: There were no people you’ve kept up with from those days, are there?

EVANS: No. Not a soul. But, you know, I had some pretty good friends later on that I remember.

But, no, I don’t know anybody now.

CUMMINGS: You came back in 1927 – right?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Do you know why you came back? Was it just that the time was up? Did you have any specific direction?

EVANS: Well, I don’t know that I can put my finger on it now. I guess I sensed that I had just about used up my credit, for one thing, that I had no right to ask my father to support me any more.

Either that or I was told to come back. Or maybe it was just inferred it was time.

CUMMINGS: On coming back here did you have a job or anything to do?

EVANS: Nothing. Nothing to look forward to, nothing to do. I was in fear and confusion really.

CUMMINGS: And you still were not writing?

EVANS: No. I must have felt a terrible failure and therefore I must have felt very scared and insecure. I’m sure I did.

CUMMINGS: What happened on your return? You had – what? – temporary jobs and things of that nature?

EVANS: Yes. I had odd jobs. I guess soon after that I got hold of a camera and got passionately interested in that.

I do remember having jobs at night at two different places, once on Wall Street, and once at the New York Public Library so that I could have the days free.

I photographed during the day.

CUMMINGS: How did the camera appear? Was that through a friend? Or what happened?

EVANS: I really don’t know very much about that. I just don’t know.

As a boy I had a cheap little camera and I had gone through the hobby photography experience developing film in the bathroom and so on.

And I think it came from painters. Several of my friends were painters. And I had a visual education that I had just given myself.

CUMMINGS: Who were the painters?

EVANS: Well, I don’t know anybody that you’d speak of now.

There was a German boy who turned out to be a terrible failure. A very sad case. He lost his confidence. He was a pretty good painter but he couldn’t make it. He was starving all of the time. I got to know him; I guess I must have met him in the Library.

He was a very interesting but semi-pathological, I mean melancholy guy. I guess I romanticized his European background.

This guy was gifted, though, he was a real artist. I was always interested in artists.

CUMMINGS: Where do you think that came from? Through literature?

EVANS: I don’t know. No, no. I was just drawn to that.

Partly I think added to it is the fact that I think I associated that with forbidden fruit, really.

It was not the thing to do. So I would do it.

CUMMINGS: The bohemian life and adventure thing.

EVANS: Yes. Exactly.

CUMMINGS: Were there any other artists that you knew at that point?

EVANS: Well, a little later, yes. Quite a lot.

CUMMINGS: But I mean in the late twenties.

WALJER EVANS: What year are we talking about now?

CUMMINGS: 1927, 1928.

EVANS: Yes, I began to know artists and writers in the Village and in Brooklyn and Brooklyn Heights.

CUMMINGS: Did you live in the Village or in Brooklyn?

EVANS: Both. I’ve lived in both and they’re not very clear in my mind now – which came first and how long in what places.

But, you know, its pretty typical –

CUMMINGS: Yes, moving around.

EVANS: Yes. I was the young bohemian artist, absolutely typical; although at the time I didn’t know it.

But I was.

CUMMINGS: Let’s see, you started becoming interested in photography again after about 1928?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: What kind of things did you photograph? What were you interested in doing with the camera at that point?

EVANS: I think I was photographing against the style of the time, against salon photography, against beauty photography, against art photography.

CUMMINGS: The whole elaborate business –

EVANS: Yes. Even including Stieglitz.

I was doing non-artistic and non- commercial work. I felt – and it’s true – I was on the right track. I sensed that I was turning new ground.

At least I though I was mining a new vein, sort of instinctively knowing it but not in any other way aware of it.

CUMMINGS: Did you know the photographers at that time?

EVANS: No. I wasn’t drawn to the world of photography. In fact I was against it.

CUMMINGS: Really?

EVANS: Yes. I was a maverick outsider.

CUMMINGS: You really seem to have always been pushing the wrong thing all the time.

EVANS: Yes, I was against the grain.

CUMMINGS: After you got the camera what did you start with, would you say? Was it the city? Or people? Or signs?

EVANS: Both. As a matter of fact, I really think I was on the right track right away and I don’t think I’ve made very many false moves. I now feel almost mystical about it.

I think something was guiding me, was working through me. I really do.

I feel that I was doing better than I knew how, that it was almost fate.

I really was inventing something but I didn’t know it.

CUMMINGS: You hadn’t studied photography with anybody or anything?

EVANS: No. Well, I worked at it. I taught myself photography.

I got all the books and also talked to anybody that knew anything about it.

And I was interested in the technique of it. Oh, sure.

CUMMINGS: What kind of cameras did you use when you started?

EVANS: Anything I could get my hands on.

CUMMINGS: Anything that worked?

EVANS: Sure. That puts me – I mean my time puts me back in photography into a very interesting, very archaic period – glass plates, monochromatic film, no meters, no filters, none of those things.

You had to learn how to expose.

PAUL CUMMIGNS: Right. It was all guesswork and experimentation.

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: What do you think were the qualities of salon photography that aggravated you or that you reacted against?

EVANS: Oh, conventionality, cliché, unoriginality.

CUMMINGS: Well, what about Stieglitz? You obviously knew about him and Camera Work and publication and his gallery.

EVANS: Stefan Hirsch, a painter – did you ever hear of him? Do you remember the name?

CUMMINGS Yes.

EVANS: He was living in Brooklyn Heights. I got to know him.

He knew Stieglitz and knew that I was photographing and evidently liked my work.

He sent me to Stieglitz with a note saying – I still remember this – “Please look at this young man’s work.” That was my first encounter with Stieglitz.

CUMMINGS: How did that work?

EVANS: Oh, it was disastrous on both sides. We didn’t like each other.

I “fell in love” with Georgia O’Keeffe – well, you say that in quotes. I mean as a matter of fact I actually did without knowing it.

I was very taken with her because she was nice to me, and was sensitive and beautiful. And I was probably starved for that kind of thing. And here was this wonderful woman.

Stieglitz wasn’t there when I arrived. She begun talking to me with kindness and understanding and, naturally, I was crazy about her. I opened up and spent half an hour talking to her before Stieglitz came in.

I showed her my work…. oh, yes.

CUMMINGS: Did he not like what you were doing? Or was it just - ?

EVANS: He was bored and tired. And furthermore I wasn’t sycophantic or worshipping of him. And he saw that immediately.

And by that time he was pretty spoiled and wanted that and needed it and used it. And didn’t want anything else, didn’t have time for anything else.

So he had no time for me at all. He said, “Very good. Go on working. Goodbye.”

CUMMINGS: And that was the end?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Did you ever have contact with him after that?

EVANS: No. I think I met him just once. I never went back.

CUMMINGS: It didn’t take, as they say

EVANS: No. And I was very shy. I only went because I felt I owed Hirsch the presentation of his letter. And having done it and having found that there wasn’t anything going on between Stieglitz and me I never bothered to go back, in spite of the fact that I was loving Georgia from afar.

She was marvelous.She was really charming.

Although I wasn’t interested in her painting very much. She was just a hell of a warm, nice woman, really generous and really giving, really sensitive. As we should be with a younger person. I mean they need it terribly. And we don’t give it very much.

They don’t get very much kindness and understanding. They just don’t get it. I think we ought to go in. It’s going to get chilly out here.

EVANS: ….so tight. He noticed that. He said, “For God’s sake, just paint. Let go.

Sure you can paint anything. Take that brush in you had and do it. He used to stand over you and make you.

It was a great help. It was used as shock treatment, as you can do with friends, you know.

He’d almost threaten you, “If you don’t paint I’ll kill you.”

CUMMINGS: Oh, he was so big and blustery.

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: You had those evening jobs – you had one at the Public Library?

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: How did you ever happen to work there? Just something you heard about? Or was it because it was a night job?

EVANS: I have loved books so much – I’m almost a pathological bibliophile – and I was drawn to it. I wanted to get into the stacks of the Library.

I really went to work there because I wanted to see the stacks. You couldn’t see it otherwise. I went to the head of the Library and said, “I’ll work here for nothing.”

I think he said it was against the rules but he gave me a job tracing books. You were a book runner.

Well, he could see that I was a college kid. I now can see what college kids are like. Anyhow, I got a paying job there in the map room at night.

CUMMINGS: What actually did you do there in the map room? What were the duties?

EVANS: There was a special room for maps. I’d give them out.

People came there and they’d sign up and ask for a map and I’d go and get it for them.

CUMMINGS: How long did that last? – a few months? A year?

EVANS: Yes. Something like that. Maybe a year.

CUMMINGS: And the Wall Street job came after that?

EVANS: I don’t know. Probably at the same time. No, wait a minute.

As a matter of fact, I think that the Library job was before I went to France and the Wall Street job was afterward. That’s the way it was, yes.

CUMMINGS: Wall Street didn’t interest you?

EVANS: In a way everything interests me and nothing. Of course it didn’t interest me really.

Part of it would fascinate me. Sure. Well, I was at the bottom with the dregs.

CUMMINGS: In the back room with all the paper and stuff.

EVANS: Yes. Sorting out numbers.

CUMMINGS: But you were busy taking photographs during that time?

EVANS: Oh, yes. At the Wall Street time, yes.

CUMMINGS: Right.

EVANS: I had a passion for photography.

I could think about nothing else much; reading and photography.

CUMMINGS: Were there older photographers that interested you?

EVANS: No.

CUMMINGS: That you studied or looked at?

EVANS: No. Nothing. Well, I did get excited over one Paul Strand picture.

I remember his famous Blind Woman excited me very much. I said that’s the thing you do.

That really charged me.

CUMMINGS: Do you remember what the qualities were of that photograph?

EVANS: The Strand picture? Sure. It was strong and real it seemed to me.

And a little bit shocking; brutal.

CUMMINGS: Well, those were qualities then that you worked for – right?

EVANS: Well, that’s what attracted me in art.

I mean I would read a book like Thompson’s Hunger and that was a joy because I thought that was real. It really wasn’t.

But the lack of judgment of this particular youth – me – led me to believe that since I had a genteel upbringing that real life was starvation; so that it was honest to write about that.

That’s all wrong; but that’s what I thought. I thought to photograph the Blind Woman was the thing to do.

CUMMINGS: It was very close to that time that you got involved with Lincoln Kirstein and Ben Shahn and all of these people?

EVANS: That came a little later. But I did, yes.

CUMMINGS: This was the early thirties, wasn’t it? 1930, 1931.

EVANS: Yes.

CUMMINGS: Did you just meet them in moving around the world?

EVANS: Well, you know, that’s a mystery to me looking back on it. I feel in a way you sort of meet the people you’re meant to meet. But everybody seemed to know everybody then.

If you lived in the Village you knew the serious artists in the Village.

The town was full of loafers and drunks. But there were a few people there like Jim Agee and Ben Shahn and I don’t know who else that I knew.

We were all pretty damn serious and hardworking people.

We believed in ourselves and in art, in being artists. There wasn’t any play about that. We were ready to starve for it. And did.

CUMMINGS: This is also the beginning of the Depression?

EVANS: Yes. Exactly.

CUMMINGS: You also knew Muriel Draper at one point?

EVANS: That came out – I’ll never forgive Szarkowski who got that thing from Lincoln Kirstein. It was Lincoln who introduced me to the great Draper woman.

There’s a very perverse side to Lincoln, you know; he loves all sorts of funny business.

That certainly was high cheese.

CUMMINGS: Well, she was sort of – I can’t really figure out what she was.

EVANS: You know, really she was a remarkable woman and she was very useful in the education of young men like me at that time. I must say it.

Although she was putting on an act and it was completely artificial and phony to the fingertips, there was still something good in it.

CUMMINGS: That’s interesting. She was a friend of Mark Tobey’s too at one point.

EVANS: Yes. I remember meeting Tobey there.

She was the great mother of all artists. Anybody who was an artist could come to her house. And that’s a good thing too.

There ought to be a house like that. It was an imitation French salon, indiscriminate, but the nearest thing we had to that. And that’s necessary in a culture really.

CUMMINGS: So it was a good place to meet people and talk.

EVANS: Sure. And a lot went on. A lot of it questionable but it went on anyway.

CUMMINGS: Well, but sometimes that’s important.

EVANS: Sure, it is. It was anything but a respectable house.

CUMMINGS: What about Lincoln Kirstein? Did you get to know him well?

EVANS: Well, I’ll be damned if I remember how I met him. But probably at – well, I was going to say at the Draper’s but how – no, I think he must have taken me to Muriel Draper’s house.

But I do remember meeting him – there was a sort of false start in our relationship.

I had another night job in a bookstore and he used to come in there. After talking with him I could see that he was a brilliant young man.

I didn’t know who he was and he never introduced himself. Then when I met him later on – where I do not know – I remembered this guy coming into the bookstore.

I met lots of people that way. I met Martha Graham that way. She never told me who she was.

CUMMINGS: What bookstore was that?

EVANS: Well, it was an odd thing.

I’ll leave the name out of this because the bookstore was questionable inasmuch as a figure in the New York literary world, a rich young man, was trying to get rid of a girl he had, and he set her up in the bookstore.

CUMMINGS: Was that in the Village?

EVANS: No. It was on 57th Street. But I know that this girl had some sort of hold on him, or he thought she did, and he gave her a bookstore to manage.

She didn’t know anything about books. I wandered in there one night and sort of asked for a job and got it. And then I bought books for her.

She didn’t even know how to buy books. I had been to Paris and I made my connections; I imported French books. I remember Lincoln coming in and saying, “Who gets these books?”

This is interesting: I put a display in the window of modern French literature. And sure enough Lincoln came in. People are attracted to these things.

CUMMINGS: They drift in. So that got you involved with Kirstein – right?

EVANS: Yes. But now I’m interested to know – I don’t want to waste our time – but to tell you the truth I’d love to know myself where I met Lincoln Kirstein. I just don’t know.
Oh! He had the Hound and Horn and I may have gone to try to sell him pictures.

He published photographs and I may have seen that. And he did publish pictures of mine.

Or he may have come to me – he was interested in photographers and in unknown artists and he may have found out that I was an unknown artist and looked me up. But I just do not know. I must ask him some day.

But he won’t know either. He’s very untrustworthy; that is, you can’t count on the accuracy of what he says. He just loves to throw things around.

CUMMINGS: What about Ben Shahn? You got involved with him, too, at some time?

EVANS: Yes. I did. This is all interesting. This is what I say: People do get drawn together when they’re sort of meant to. Shahn and I met at somebody’s house on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn.
I know that. There was a doctor there who picked me up on the street because he was a photographer.

You see, if you’re in that neighborhood – it’s a little neighborhood – you can talk to anybody. And two photographers would talk to each other on photographing in the New York style – it’s the most obvious photograph in the world.

And then this guy asked me to come to his house. I went to his house and there was Shahn.
That was a kind of salon also.

CUMMINGS: Do you remember who he was?

EVANS: Yes, I do remember who he was. He had an assumed name. He called himself Yago Galston. And his name was not that at all. He just made that up.

He was a doctor who wouldn’t practice. He was in medical politics in the Association and all that stuff. What do they call it?

CUMMINGS: Oh, the American Medical Association?

EVANS: Yes. I think he was manager of it, or secretary, or something like that.

CUMMINGS: That’s incredible. Well, you shared a studio or something with Shahn, didn’t you for a while?

EVANS: I did indeed. Not in Brooklyn but over on Bethune Street in Manhattan. Sure. Not only did I share a studio but twice over – he had an apartment with an under basement and I lived in the basement.

And he had these two children upstairs and his wife, Tillie. And I was in the basement.

And later across the street we all had a studio with Lou Block, the three of us, but mostly Ben and me. I had the back and he had the front.

23 Bethune Street, I remember it so well.

CUMMINGS: What was it like sharing space with a painter, sharing a studio with a
painter?

EVANS: The questions should be: “What’s it like with Shahn?” – because everybody is different and Shahn was a very special character.

CUMMINGS: Right.

EVANS: Well, we had a great attachment to each other Shahn and I. Also he was an overpowering man. Which I begun to resent.

He was too strong for me. But I knew I was getting educated.

After all, a little boy from Kenilworth had never seen anybody like that, the son of a Russian immigrant really right out of the streets, you know, and tough. All the things I thought were exotic and fascinating.

It was very marvelous. I was very attracted to his work. I loved it. I still do to this day. It’s not very fashionable to love it but I do.

Everybody is disillusioned with Shahn really after having called him the greatest of contemporary artists. He’s lost that status I think.

But he was a very clever and interesting artist. We both had the same kind of an eye really. That’s why he got interested in photography. He used to shamelessly make pictures from photographs.

CUMMINGS: Oh, yes.

EVANS: Newspapers or his own. That’s why he took it up.

CUMMINGS: What about photography? - because he did a lot of photography in the thirties at one point, didn’t he?

EVANS: Yes, he did.

CUMMINGS: But that was through the Farm Security Administration?

EVANS: No – well, I think he got them to send him on a couple of trips. He could wrap Mr. Stryker around his finger; and did. He would go over there and get a trip out of it.

He could go up with all expenses paid with his girl Bernarda. And they had a fine time.

Ben really worked Washington for all it was worth.

CUMMINGS: Well, he seems to have done that all of his life.

EVANS: Of course, yes. He was a great worker in that sense.

That always irritated me because he would do things that would embarrass me, that I wouldn’t do.

CUMMINGS: What about Hart Crane? How did you do the photographs for The Bridge, for example?

EVANS: Well, I think he must have picked me up in the street too, in Brooklyn Heights.

That’s where he was living. Anyway we did get to know each other. And there, again, I don’t know how…. You see, I’d love to know how…. I could find out from Kirstein I suppose.

After all, Crane is dead. I don’t know how I met him. But, you see, those are significant meetings. They just happened. They’re bound to happen.

He was in love with the Bridge and he just loved those photographs. And I had a feeling for the Bridge.

You know, at that time he was drinking very heavily and would act out in alcohol all sorts of desires and fantasies. You know, it was a shaky business because alcoholism is not very real, straight, or strong.

His whole effect was a very boozy kind of thing. In fact, it was too much so for me. I used to have to run away from him. I couldn’t stand that kind of thing. You know, calling up in the middle of the night and all sorts of things.

He loved violence and he’d get into trouble with sailors and they’d beat him up and he’d call me up and say, “Save me.” I can’t stand that sort of thing; never could.

I remember once I had to change my telephone number because Crane bothered me too much.

CUMMINGS: That’s terrible.

EVANS: I did like him. He really was a very brilliant guy, worth knowing after all.
A marvelous talker.

CUMMINGS: It’s interesting that you’ve done projects with so many literary people.

EVANS: Yes. You see, I’m literary. The Crane and Agee one – I wouldn’t call that much of a project with Crane. I did those things and he took them, that’s all.

I didn’t do them for him at all. They were there already. He said, “I want these for this edition of The Bridge.”

CUMMINGS: How did the Depression affect you in the early thirties as far as work and living?

EVANS: Well now I have a theory in retrospect that it was good for us all.

You couldn’t do anything else anyway. It gave us time without the pressure of getting a job. You couldn’t get a job.

I think it produced a lot of artists, or allowed a crowd of people who were on the road to being artists to stay artists instead of going off into Wall Street or Time, Inc. or some place and losing it.

I stayed on; I probably would have anyway because I was very willful about it.

I was going to be an artist and I’d be goddamned if I was going to be a commercial businessman or a success at anything else.

There was a hell of a pressure on you to do that. I wouldn’t do it.

CUMMINGS: You never did have a studio like photographers and do all that for - ?

EVANS: No! Where would I have the money?

That’s expensive. I wasn’t in it that way. I’ve rigged up places. I’ve taken an apartment and made one room into a studio, yes. But not a studio in a sense that I was taking on –

CUMMINGS: A commercial project.

EVANS: I had no base of that sort.

CUMMINGS: It never interested you?

EVANS: Well, no. I couldn’t do that. I knew that meant going into business and ruining what I was doing.

Once in a while I’ve flirted with – I’ve had a couple of flirtations with advertising photography.
It made me sick.

Somebody at N.W. Ayer persuaded me to do a series of advertising things. I needed the money. I went down to Philadelphia and did these things.

Then they asked me to come and work there. I wouldn’t do it.

CUMMINGS: It wasn’t the road.

EVANS: No. After all, my father was in the advertising business. I knew what it was like. I didn’t want to be like that.

CUMMINGS: What about the later thirties? You worked on the Project, didn’t you, at one point? Or did you?

EVANS: Well, I was on the Resettlement Administration which became Farm Security Administration, a sort of team they had. Sure.

I think I was the original one there. I went down there at the suggestion of Ernestine Evans when Roy Stryker didn’t know what he was doing, didn’t know why he was there.

He was just a friend of Tugwell’s. I think he had been a history teacher.

They said, “We’ll have a historical division here.” It was crazy, you know. Nobody could take it seriously. It was just mad, inefficient bureaucracy.

CUMMINGS: Do you think that was a rewarding activity for you? To travel and take photographs?

EVANS: Oh, gosh, yes! Why not? Of course it was!

CUMMINGS: In what kind of specific ways?

EVANS: Well, a subsidized freedom to do my stuff!

Good heavens, what more could anyone ask for!

CUMMINGS: Time and equipment again.

EVANS: Yes. And the result shows it. I had that whole hot year tremendously productive.

I developed my own eye, my own feeling about this country, Oh gosh, yes, that was great for me!

CUMMINGS: Do you think that that period of work was an influence on subsequent things as far as how you looked at things and - ?

EVANS: Well, yes, in the sense that inevitably I was growing and getting experience that I would then use. Sure, I developed.

But, mind you, this development wasn’t in the eyes and minds of the Federal Government at all.

It was all an accident that as an artist I found this development there.

They had that thing set up for an entirely different reason.

CUMMINGS: Right. Well, they usually do.

EVANS: Sure. It was an entirely different thing.

CUMMINGS: It’s interesting how many people complained about the Federal Projects early on and now they’re supposed to be marvelous things.

EVANS: Is that so? I’m sure that’s the case. Yes.

CUMMINGS: You did a commission for Kirstein at one time photographing some houses, didn’t you?

EVANS: Well, that’s what seems to be part of the legend. I wouldn’t put it that way.

He took me off on a trip. He and particularly Jack Wheelwright – John Brooks Wheelwright – were interested in a romantic revival and other unstudied, undiscovered really, styles in American architecture.

I was a photographer and Kirstein had the natural idea, “Well, let’s go and photograph these things.” I didn’t think twice about it.I was interested in doing it.

I was perfectly free and had a camera and if he wanted to finance the trip that was all right with me. We went in his car to various places not too far.

I’ve forgotten where we stayed. I think he was still an undergraduate; we probably stayed in his rooms in Cambridge.

At that time his family lived in Boston. I remember meeting his mother. And I met Jack Wheelwright who was a friend of Lincoln’s, a young Boston poet, aristocrat, esthete, Harvard tradition.

[End of Part 1]

Oral history interview with Walker Evans, 1971 Oct. 13-Dec. 23, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Extract from 'A River of Red Runs Through It' by Geoff Crook (from 'RED' by Nick Lloyd)

2010-12-26T22:31:00.004Z

As promised, the following extract is by Geoff Crook from his foreword to my forthcoming new book 'Red'.

"Over the centuries London, has co-opted the colour Red for an extraordinarily diverse range of symbolic intentions.

Before Nick’s book we were familiar with two versions of Red London; the red Tourist’s City and the red Branded City

The red Tourist London is most visible in the souvenir stores. It is a dead Red city overrun with Red Guardsmen, Red Beefeater’s, Red Post, Red Telephone boxes, Red ‘Routemaster’ Buses and the Red ringed London ‘Underground’ logo.

Tourist London is a fictional city that had colour coded London as a Red spot on the global tourist’s map.

The red Branded city of London, like many other ‘over globalised’ capital cities, displays a similar lack of imagination.

Favoured by advertisers, red is brandished without subtlety or restraint for products as diverse as fast food or perfume, to create an ocean of red hoardings & red posters that integrate and ingratiate within the often chaotic landscape of this modern city.

Beyond these familiar Red London’s there is however another, more interesting and more dynamic Red city.

Nick Lloyd’s revelatory book confirms that London is much more than a tourist centre or the subject of brand ‘fiction’.

It is the world’s Red city."

A word about the new blog

2010-12-11T09:48:00.002Z

Hi,
The blog is back! With a new name, a cleaner look and (importantly!) more space for photographs, films and sound recordings from photographers who mean something to me.
Over the coming Xmas/New Year break, I hope to show examples of the new work, promised back in the summer. As well as posting Geoff Crook's writing for 'Red' , the upcoming new book on blurb.
It's been a longer wait that expected and unfortunately this blog, in terms of other priorities both at home & work has been the main casualty.
I'll be posting more regularly now.
In the meantime please check out the new content featured on this new layout - including films & interviews.
The 'Visions and Images' video series from youtube is a recommended watch. The interview with Garry Winogrand, shows Garry in especially good form. You'll see he gave the host, Barbara Lee Diamondstein, what I suspect was an unexpectedly 'tough' interview. Makes a good companion to an archival audio recording I've been listening to recently from a visit Garry made to MIT as a guest lecturer.

See you soon with another post and new pictures.

Why the latest book is taking longer (the ugly truth)

2010-08-03T20:11:00.001+01:00

Sometimes, life takes a turn you can't believe and you're left shaking your head at the strange, wonderful, and at times angry & frustrating world you find yourself in. And so it's been for me and my partner these last few weeks. And why? Well, to put it plainly - our house was struck by lightning. Strange, crazy lightning that blew out our telephone and internet access (now fixed) and also some of our important electricals like TV, freeview box and video player. But also my (now defunct) desktop pc that I was using to create the layout and production of 'red'. The files have been retrieved OK but further work has halted until my new computer arrives.

It's been frustrating but in a positive way as we've been 'forced' by circumstance into looking at shiny new upgrades that we otherwise would have put off doing for as long as we could. Living without full power in a modern house is also more difficult than I remembered. Having grown up during the miners strikes in the UK, during the 1970's I remember using candles to light rooms and putting up with boring evenings with the family while sitting in the gloom.
However losing electricity in a house in the1970's is a very different prospect from a house in 2010. We have so many more gadgets and such a different relationship to technology, that days without internet or TV seem a more agonising and difficult prospect.
We get TV back in a few days. And so back to the modern life.......

However, despite this recent setback, there have been very positive developments since my last post. Geoff Crook's text for the new book was finished recently and looks and sounds great. Not absolutely sure where to place it for best effect. I'm leaning towards probably placing it after the photographs, as an afterword.

Seeing the text from my contributors take shape during production, has definately (as with 'pedestrian' and now 'red') been one of the greatest pleasures for me. Who to ask next?

Very tired now after another long night without much sleep. Will update again soon.

cheers

Nick

Update on 'red' the book....and more

2010-06-23T12:04:00.001+01:00

Since my last post, I've been busy editing and packaging the contents of the new book 'red' for publication by blurb. The work has taken longer than I expected, hence the lack of new posts for some time. But I am now getting back on track and hope to see the majority of the book finished in the next week or so.

Geoff Crook is starting work on some writing to appear at the back of the work - so it IS coming together. Just slower than I anticipated a few months ago.

And for anyone who's wondering about what actual 'new' photography is taking place while there are all these delays. This is the best bit of news. I'm deep in the middle of something new and I'm waiting a while before I start showing it publicly. Not because I'm shy about it, just excited and being swept along by where this new poject & new direction takes me. So be patient, I WILL start showing it.

What I can say, for anyone who's frustrated by the smaller size of the images I've shown over the last couple of years (produced by the 2MB Casio Excilim - see the top image) is that the new work is very different, completely high res and very dynamic.

I'll check back soon with more...

Nick

Photographs etc. - Nick Lloyd Home Page

Holding

The Safety check

Expression

Subway protest

The Protection Suit

Bored by History

Masks

New Year Blossom

Talking about Walker Evans (Charlie Rose & Jeff Rosenheim)

Ansel Adams interview (1983 Master Photographers series)

Bill Brandt interview (1983 Master Photographers series)

Xmas greetings (North Finchley style)

What Film Photography Still Has to Offer (CNN)

A Dragon in Chinatown

Paul Caponigro - and why he matters

Martin Parr & Photography workshops

Raymond Moore - TV documentary special

Hear and See Walker Evans on film

Charlie Rose: A Conversation with Henri Cartier Bresson (video)

Serious Play: The Worlds of Helen Levitt (video)

Robert Frank interview by Peter Burchett

Time Capsule' - NY Times excerpt from Louis Faurer's short film on Times Square.

Cab-driving shutterbug chronicles Istanbul's underbelly (CNN video)

The shock of the real!

William Albert Allard - The West

Man with Bandage - Fred Herzog

Vivian Maier - Chicago and New York

Charles Harbutt - The Face of the City

Aaron Siskind and Franz Kline

Why Gene Colan Was A Master

Gene Colan - The Great

Andre Kertesz and William Eggleston

William Eggleston and Ralph Goings

Stephen Shore & Richard Estes

The changing face of Henri

Garry Winogrand - Colour Photographs

I don't give a !*@$ about gasoline stations (another Garry Winogrand interview)

Saul Leiter Interview (Parts 1 - 3)

John Salt, Photorealist painter (video interview)

John Salt - Side Street Parking (1987)

Leon Levinstein - his words and thoughts

Jem Cohen on Leon Levinstein

Hear Leon Levinstein talk about his work (MP3 format)

Leon Levinstein - The Forgotten Master

Vivian Maier - Self Portrait

Vivian Maier - colour image

"A photograph is not an accident—it is a concept. It exists at, or before, the moment of exposure...." Ansel Adams"My intention is to make interesting photographs. That's it, in the end. I don't make it up. Let's say it's a world I never made. That's what was there to deal with." Gary Winnogrand

The Station (Night & Day)

Waiting at the station (more pictures from Transit)

TRANSIT PART 2- THE STATION - Photographs and edits for the next book

TRANSIT PART 1- PASSENGERS - Photographs and edits for the next book

Comparing Louis Faurer (colour images) with Fred Herzog

The amazing Canadian photographer - Fred Herzog

Garry Winogrand Video interview (some extracts from him & thoughts from me)

Rare Walker Evans interview (3 of 3)

Rare Walker Evans interview 1971 (part 2 of 3)

Rare 1971 interview with photographer Walker Evans (part 1 of 3)

Extract from 'A River of Red Runs Through It' by Geoff Crook (from 'RED' by Nick Lloyd)

A word about the new blog

Why the latest book is taking longer (the ugly truth)

Update on 'red' the book....and more