They’re a group of prints showing four, commonplace tools. Enlarged many times their actual size, they’ve become something much more monumental.
They include tin snips, a crescent wrench and, my favourite, a crate opener. The latter stands out because the large format print makes it easy to read the lettering on the side that names it as a particular type of crate opener called a Baby Terrier.
The prints are all black and white. The even lighting virtually eliminates any shadows and highlights the texture of the metal surfaces. Their directness and simplicity made me think of another important but absent tool: the camera used by the photographer.
Even though they’re neither arty nor dramatic, they were part of a series called Beauties of the Common Tool published in the 1950s in Fortune, a high-end magazine that I wouldn’t normally associate with such experimental photography.
But they made it into print because they were the work of Walker Evans who, at the time, was Fortune’s staff photographer.
Evans is probably best known for taking iconic photographs of poor tenant farmers in the U.S. in the 1930s. For many people, Evans’ images have come to visually symbolize the effects of the Great Depression on Americans. They also played a huge role in creating a tradition that became known as documentary photography.
Both the banal tools and the portraits of poor farmers are part of an exhibition of work by Evans at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Walker Evans: Depth of Field is the largest and most comprehensive view of Evans’ work ever mounted, according to John T. Hill, exhibition curator and executor of Evans’ estate.
During a media tour of the exhibition Thursday, Hill said that while Evans was best-known for those Depression-era photographs, they weren’t the only photographs he took during his career.
“There was a great deal of genius and brilliance before and after that,” he said.
Along with several cameras used by Evans, the exhibition presents a comprehensive look at Evans’ career through more than 200 photographs from the 1920s to the 1970s, arranged chronologically.
As Grant Arnold, the exhibition’s co-curator said, Evans was unusual as an art photographer because much of the work he did was produced on assignment. For example, he went to Cuba in 1933 to take photographs for a book on the oppressive conditions there. A few years later, he was one of several photographers hired to work for the Farm Security Administration, the U.S. federal agency started as part of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to provide help and jobs to an estimated one quarter of the U.S. workforce that was unemployed because of the 1929 stock market crash.
Evans, Arnold said, always had a knack for doing what he wanted no matter who was paying the bill.
The FSA wanted its photographers to show how effective its programs were in alleviating poverty. Evans wasn’t interested in using his camera to spread what he considered propaganda.
“Evans was very good at following the instructions he was given just enough so that he wouldn’t get fired,” Arnold said.
It’s a good thing kept true to his word because his photographs a remarkable record of the era. If you Google “Walker Evans”, the first images that pop up are portraits of Alabama tenant farmer Floyd Burroughs and a cotton tenant farmer’s wife known as the ‘Appalachian Madonna.’ They’re both in the exhibition as silver gelatin prints, which have much more texture to them than flat digital images.
They’re close to an amazing portrait of a sharecropper’s family of six. On the left, Lily, sits on the edge of the bed holding a sleeping baby in her lap. Everyone has bare feet except for the older woman on the right — Lily’s mother — who clasps her hands in front of her on her lap. A little girl stands in a filthy dress that looks like it’s held together by a safety pin near the neck. Beside her, William “Bud” Fields, the patriarch, sits in a chair. He has a bandana partly wrapped around his neck and chest. Between his legs, he’s holding the arms of a nearly naked boy standing on the wooden floor with his left leg bent to form a triangle with his right.
Like the tools Evans depicted many years later, the photograph of the six family members is direct and plain. They’re neither above us or below us but at eye level among us. As an honest and intimate depiction of poverty, it’s one of the exhibition’s outstanding photographs.
“A near heroic quality in the image overshadows our awareness of the family’s living conditions,” Hill says about the photograph in the exhibition catalogue.