★ Literary and visual texts of the American South ★

.... was / is the title of my most extensive work (actually my thesis at the Karl-Franzens Universität in Graz). My interest in the Southern literature and photography did not end with the completion of that extensive work....so, here's a little something about a famous photographer of the South...

Walker Evans

Walker Evans, Decade by Decade

By Lenora Jane Estes

8:00 AM, June 11 2010

Pabst Blue Ribbon Sign, Chicago, Illinois, 1946. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Walker Evans’s early documentary photographs of poverty in the South during the Great Depression captured the public’s attention—even altering the way many Americans saw their country—and helped define his 46-year career. Yet his little–known works produced in the ensuing decades are equally as innovative. Drawn chiefly from a largely unseen private collection, and curated by the ever–inventive James Crump, the Cincinnati Art Museum’s Decade by Decade (on display through September 5), is the first exhibition spanning Evans’s work from every decade, including his years at Fortune magazine in the 1940’s, 50s, and 60s, until his death in 1975. The exhibition also debuts rare photographs from the Victorian House survey series, which Evans began in 1931, as well as prints from a trip to Tahiti the following year. As a coda, the show offers Evans’s very last images, shot in the 70s with the then–new Polaroid SX–70. Quote Evans, “The matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt.”
Below: A display of both iconic and lesser–known gems from Walker Evans.

Man Posing for Picture in Front of Wooden House, 1933. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

 

★ Analogue nostalgia

Looks like someone is going to shoot a wedding in Las Vegas in January:)))))) yeeeehaw!
Need more memory cards, flash, additional battery (= reminder!!). Oh, man (I moan) .Where have all the good days in photography gone. You know... getting a role of film or two and wait patiently (and economically) for that perfect shot. No memory cards for thousands of random, shitty photos you can delete afterwards. No spending money you don't have for additional equipment you need with a digital. Just the basics and patience, and eagerness to see the developed role of film, being intimate with it in the dark room, putting it on the reels in complete darkness, taking it to the sink in a tank, pouring liquids into it, shaking it, checking the clock, and then getting it out and ...MAGIC. Your efforts unwind on a strip of film. You dry it, take it to the darkroom and with a bit of light and chemicals, you make a print. It's a ritual. Meditation topped with the feeling of success.

Well, and now.... the digital mania is here. The analogue material is almost gone, and I have to make do with what I have. And what I have is not much. It's a shitty lens, performing terribly bad in low light conditions. I'll have to go through hell to get a few good shots in the city of lights. Irony right there. I'm going to the city of lights and it will be too dark for good shots. hehahha.
Well, it will be like in the good old days. Before I went to the States in 2003, my grandmother secretly gave me a little money, so that I could buy a camera there. And so I did. At Pinkey's, in this run down neighborhood with run down houses and broken cars along the road in Little Rock, I bought my very first totally manual, analogue, camera, a Kalimar with an additional zoom lens. It was a great camera for learning (a requirement in my photography class). I used it throughout my travels. I remember using it at concerts, in Las Vegas....well, in places with low light. And I got some good shots. They were not the most clear shots in the world, but they were good, thanx to the low light lens I used. No flash. :) And I managed.

Here are some shots with this camera (scanned).

~ my very first (or maybe second) print, right out of the darkroom ~

~Faulkner House, Conway ~

~ Cleaning lady in the music hall, Hendrix College ~

~ Inspired by Newton ~

~ Clarksdale, Mississippi - home of the blues ~

~ Clarksdale, Mississippi ~