Università Roma Tre

"WITH THE CAMERA, IT'S ALL OR NOTHING". WALKER EVANS, CONTEMPORARY ARTIST

This seminar focuses on the achievements of Walker Evans (1903-1975) and historiographical issues related to his work. Evans, who emerged in the 1930s as one of the protagonists of documentary photography, was consecrated by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 with the first solo exhibition the museum ever dedicated to a photographer. The book published on the occasion of the 1938 exhibition, American Photographs, a second book with James Agee in 1941 (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), and another MoMA retrospective organized by John Szarkowski in 1971 can be seen as the three major moments of Evans' canonization as the prototypical interpreter of the American Depression and as the "father" of serious art photography in the second half of the 20th century.
The course aims at debunking the myth of Evans' canon by analyzing all the different phases of his artistic endeavor, from the late 1920s to his death in 1975. Special attention will be given to the evolution of Evans' photographic language in relation to other media and practices (literature, painting, architecture); to the different lives and discursive spaces of the photographic text (the archive, the museum, the magazine, the book); finally, to the process of critical definition and historiographical revision of photography's value as art in the postwar period, both in the US and in Europe.
Through lectures, readings, class discussions, the definition of a research project, and a final paper, students will be asked to confront the problems, methods, and products of art-historical investigation applied to the medium of contemporary photography.

Weekly readings:
W. Evans, The Reappearance of Photography, in "Hound & Horn", vol. 5, n. 1, October-December 1931, pp. 125-28.
L. Kirstein, Photographs of America: Walker Evans, in W. Evans, American Photographs, cit., pp. 189-98.
W. Evans, Labor Anonymous, in "Fortune", vol. 34, n. 5, November 1946, pp. 152-53.
W. Evans, Photography, in Louis Kronenberger (a cura di), Quality. Its Image in the Arts, Atheneum, New York, 1969, pp. 169-211.
J. Szarkowski, Introduction, in Walker Evans, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971, pp. 9-20.
R. Krauss, Photography's Discursive Spaces: Landscape/View, in " Art Journal", vol. 42, n. 4, The Crisis in the Discipline, Winter 1982, pp. 311-19.
H. M. Sayre, American Vernacular: Objectivism, Precisionism, and the Aesthetics of the Machine, in "Twentieth Century Literature", vol. 35, n. 3, William Carlos Williams Issue, Autumn 1989, pp. 310-42.
O. Lugon, Lo stile documentario in fotografia. Da August Sander a Walker Evans, Electa, Milano, 2008 (ed. orig. francese 2001), pp. 183-203.
L. Katz, Interview with Walker Evans, in "Art in America", vol. 59, n. 2, March-April 1971, pp. 83, 85, 88.
L. Ghirri, Le carezze fatte al mondo di Walker Evans, in "Gran Bazaar", n. 46, ottobre-novembre 1985, pp. 18-19.

Reference:
J. Szarkowski (a cura di), Walker Evans, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1971.
M. Morris Hambourg et al., Walker Evans, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2000.
J. Keller, Walker Evans. The Getty Museum Collection, J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, Calif., 1995.
J. Rosenheim, D. Eklund (a cura di), Unclassified. A Walker Evans Anthology, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York e Scalo, Zürich, 2000.
J. Crump, Walker Evans. Decade by Decade, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2010; C. Chéroux (a cura di), Walker Evans, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2017.