The Biography Channel
Image by oliverlindner
The Biography Channel
Auto in MünchenWalker Evans biographies
Image by readerwalker
I\'ve been reading these biographies, checked out from FSU. The copied page is p. 52, the first page of the third chapter in Belinda Rathbone\'s 1995 biography. I\'ve been going back and forth from it to James R. Mellow\'s longer unfinished biography. The shortest book, about Evans\' later years, was a quick read for me before getting into the other two. I think all three would be quite interesting to anyone who likes Walker Evans\' pictures and wants to know more about him.
The strong shadow here doesn\'t reach anywhere near as far as it should to show the reach of Evans\' influence, which I think is still felt today, over 70 years after some of his early pictures.
For any photographer not familiar with Walker Evans (1903-1975) I recommend looking for some books with his photographs. One of my favorites, which has shown up reproduced in a number of photograph collections, is "Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1931," which some people would probably recognize even if they don\'t remember the photographer. Some of Evans\' best known pictures were in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (c1941), which was co-authored by James Agee.
By the way, I replaced this diptych twice with copies having a wider black border around the outside of the pair, but flickr kept chopping off the outside border. Then I tried once more, loading it again as a separate picture with the black border, but it was chopped off again. flickr is usually amazingly fast and capable, especially compared with a couple other picture websites I\'ve tried. But this time flickr has been stubbornly nonfunctional, though admittedly with a minor detail in a simple informational shot with no composition value. Yet if this had been a great picture with an identical black border I suppose flickr would have still cut it off, since programming code is surely indifferent to picture composition or content.
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