The Museological Mise en Scène: Walker Evans, "American Photographs", and The Museum of Modern Art

The Museological Mise en Scène: Walker Evans, "American Photographs", and The Museum ofModern ArtAuthor(s): Trudy Wilner StackSource: Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America, Vol. 13,No. 4 (Winter 1994), pp. 13-18Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Art Libraries Society of NorthAmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27948683 .

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Art Documentation, Winter 1994 13

The Museological Mise en Sc?ne:

Walker Evans, American Photographs, and The Museum of Modern Art

by Trudy Wilner Stack, Curator of Exhibitions & Collections, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona

1 I

The history of art contains the tales of many artists and their

respective patrons; of mutually beneficial partnerships between artists and backers studded with triumphs, disappointments, com

promise, frustration, and, what is often the incentive for the art ist, financial gain and respectability The photographer, a 19th century invention, rarely enjoyed full patronage in the classical sense, but beginning early in the 1930s a unique relationship of support set an early standard for institutional patronage of the

photographer. In this century, photography has elevated its stature, gaining

eventual, constrained acceptance into the art world, an ascendance

epitomized by entr?e into the museum exhibition and collection. This is the story of one of photography's accepted masters, Walker Evans, and one of the most prestigious museums, New York's Museum of Modern Art, and their consensual use of one another to establish their reputations and their historical legacies. The cen

terpiece of this alliance, and the foundation of one of photography's most influential and important museum programs, is the book and exhibition project American Photographs, first presented in 1938.1

My terminology may suggest premeditation on the part of artist and institution, but, in fact, no one could predict the evolu tion of this unprecedented association. My point is, essentially, that the match was a good one and that both parties enjoyed their

compatibility through what is now an over 60-year relationship, continuing through diverse MOMA administrations, photogra phy curators, and even the 1975 death of Evans himself?the art and the institution, by definition, long outliving the originating parties. Unusual, among other things, is that not only individual

images but a publication, American Photographs, has also remained intact and increased its weighty value, resurfacing at MOMAs in

stigation every quarter century or so as a reprint and a comple

mentary rehanging of some version of the exhibition.2 This en

during reverence for and resuscitation of American Photographs reinforces the notion that photographs can exist as potently in

sequences as singly, as reproductions as originals, as reprints as

vintage prints; that their elastic ability to shift contexts, their re lational, image-based quality, the way they are often created as variants of one another, does indeed establish the history of this medium as something different?a view Evans and his admirers always claimed. [See Fig. 1]

The photographs in this, Evans's self-proclaimed most defini tive book and exhibition, were first made under the aegis of an assortment of commissioned projects and assignments starting in 1929?as documents of vernacular architecture3 and engineering feats,4 book and magazine illustrations for texts devoted to di verse subjects from rural Alabama5 to fascist-controlled Cuba,6 and across the eastern United States, the last in the service of New Deal social policies.7 The accumulation of this varied imagery?

Figure 1. Walker Evans, Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936, American

Photographs, Part 1, Plate 2, Collection Center for Creative Photography, Farm Security Administration Photograph

the outcome of work as documentar?an, photojournalist, contract civil servant?was consolidated into a collective creative statement, American Photographs, that asserted the photographic vision of Walker Evans, giving example to his ideas (and by association MOMAs) as to what was particularly captivating about this me dium as an art form, creating a definition worthy of continued

pursuit and serious practice. Momentarily freed from the jobs that

got Evans to this heady point, a retrospective at the age of 34, he was now beholden to a new set of rigors, albeit more rarefied, that of the museological mise en sc?ne.

The late 1920s and the 1930s were Evans's and the newly opened Museum of Modern Art's formative years. Evans began to

photograph in 1928, just a year before MOMA opened its doors



14 Art Documentation, Winter 1994

for the first time. It makes sense that American Photographs, which resulted in what some call "the first modern book of photographs, against which all others must be measured," would come in the same breath as a new museum of modern art, itself to become an

international standard for what its name implied.8 Among the pivotal members of the new museum's Junior

Advisory Committee was Lincoln Kirstein, an energetic cultural catalyst from a wealthy Boston family, who counted photography as one of his many interests and Walker Evans as one of his many friends. Kirstein was a founder of the Harvard Society of Contem porary Art (in many ways a MOMA prototype) and the journal Hound & Horn, which published several articles and photographs by Evans9?who later called Kirstein the first person to recognize him as a photographer.10 Himself somewhat adrift, Evans was

charged up by the young aesthete whose passionate intellect, bank rolled enthusiasms, and impressive connections were hard to re sist. Kirstein committed himself to Evans's photography, and in turn his influence on the photographer was considerable. As Evans later put it: "Oddly enough, what happened was that this under graduate was teaching me something about what I was doing?it was a typical Kirstein switcheroo, all permeated with tremendous spirit, flash, dash and a kind of seeming high jinks that covered a really penetrating intelligence about and articulation of all esthetic

matters and their contemporary applications. It's hard to believe, but as I say the man was essentially explaining to me just what I was doing in my work."11 [See Fig. 2]

Their association led to Kirstein's suggestion of subject mat ter when, in 1931, he enlisted Evans in a project photographing

Victorian architecture from upstate New York north into New

Fig. 2. Walker Evans, Lincoln Kirstein, New York, c. 1931, Collection Center for Creative Photography, ? Walker Evans Archive,

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fig. 3. Walker Evans, Maine Pump, 1933, American Photographs. Part 2, Plate 32, Collection Center for Creative Photography, ? Walker Evans

Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art

England. These pictures were to comprise Evans's first exhibition at MOMA, entitled Walker Evans: Photographs of 19th Century Houses. Initiated and funded by Kirstein, this 1933 snowing marked the museum's first solo exhibition for a photographer. Kirstein subsequently donated 80 of the prints to the museum's permanent collection, the seeds of what is today one of the world's premier photography collections. As John Szarkowski, who later directed the course of photography at MOMA for some 30 years, pointed out: "In fact, the twenty-third work of art to enter the Museum's

collection, early in 1930, was a photograph by Walker Evans. Ar

guably the principle was thus established that photography had a

rightful place in the collection of an institution dedicated to the arts of our time."12

The job of photographing the Victorian architecture required Evans to adopt a large format camera technique. Moving in Kirstein's circle and succeeding with this Kirstein-driven topic, Evans took a giant leap towards solidifying his particular style of

image making?itself now coming ever closer to the evolving aes thetic of the museum: purist, rational, elegant, lucid, anonymously recovered from the everyday, then reinvested with the weight of art, but yet free from "artiness." [See Fig. 3]

In 1935, MOMAs director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., hired Evans to

individually photograph the objects in the exhibition African Ne

gro Art. Barr's intention was to use the pictures to create a sort of

surrogate exhibition that could travel to university galleries where the objects themselves could not go. Evans's final set of 477 pho tographs (also made with the 8 10 in. camera) of masks and other sculptural, ceremonial objects, depicted them unmoored, resting cleanly on a gray background, close-cropped, essential?

effectively focusing on the formal achievement of the African art

by melding it to his own and MOMAs shared aesthetic of a




decontextualized, seemingly unmediated, primary, urbane expres sion.13

A few years later, the museum gave Evans the opportunity to do American Photographs, not a commission but a true auteur state

ment. It was the chance to cull from his many projects to create a collective declaration of this thing called photography and just what he had managed to do with it, and the world?apparently American?he had used to do it. His direction and the museum's had coalesced on separate if occasionally intersecting paths; now his work embodied, vis-?-vis its content and its method, many of MOMAs own primary areas of interest: architecture, cinema, popu lar culture, industrial and graphic design, folk or indigenous arts, and photography as art.

The Walker Evans o? American Photographs filled the photog raphy gap in the early years of the museum, but also through both the artist and his subject MOMA was helped in its effort to assert a uniquely American modernism, an important corrective to the

repeated criticism that the museum's attention, especially Barr's, was most often turned towards Europe. While this positioning of Evans was to some extent genuine, the photographer was by no

means "the maverick outsider" he claimed to be.14 He had the pre ferred pedigree of east coast prep schools and private colleges and the prerequisite formative year in Paris. His innovations had a

European inflection and his subject was limited to an America no further West than Natchez, Mississippi, to the south, and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to the north. This blind spot to points west of New York was compatible with MOMAs own solipsistic American geography, easily ensuring the characterization of Evans and his project as unquestionably representative of America.

Evans was an intellectual artist, but also an intuitive one. To

maintain the necessary balance of those two parts, he required both freedom and control; the context the museum provided al lowed him some of each, particularly in the presentation, combi nation, and ordering of his images, crucial to the outcome of the final product. His insistent involvement in these matters of ar

rangement and exposition is often said to attest to the literariness of his sensibility. 1 would say more, that Evans should be given much credit for fully recognizing that the creative act in photogra phy can extend to every determination that affects the final expe rience of the work; that what seems concentrated in the seem

ingly simple capture of the picture continues through many more decisive stages. Kirstein and the museum, while players, gave Evans

primary sovereignty over the design and production of the book and the installation of the exhibition. He apparently banished Beau mont Newhall (Kirstein classmate, museum librarian, and newly instated resident photography expert at MOMA) from the hang ing of the exhibition. It may be appropriate to note here that Newhall had just organized Photography 1839-1937, an historical survey that was to lay the groundwork for a serious photography program at MOMA. It was accompanied by his landmark book, Photography: A Short Critical History, a blueprint to understand ing the medium and its past for generations of readers.15 Newhall,

with the encouragement of Barr, had drafted his measure of

photography's history and its present state, even assembling a small committee of advisors that included Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Walker Evans had long since dissociated himself from both Stieglitz and Steichen, his alliance with the seemingly more

lively and intellectual Kirstein being a preferred, sympathetic, and unfettered avenue into MOMAs galleries. It is likely that had Ameri can Photographs come much later in Newhall's tenure, with a for

mal photography program in place, the freedom that Evans had been afforded, creating something of an artist's book and a veri table installation piece of his photographs, would not have come to pass. His pull with Kirstein and Barr allowed him to disdain

Newhall: in one case Evans told Newhall, through a third party, that he would "exhibit his photographs only on condition that he be allowed to hang them himself, and not in your presence."16 This confrontation points to Evans's view that the museum con

text, while alluring, was also confining, that it could even suffo cate or misrepresent his work. The museum's aura of good taste,

Fig. 4. Walker Evans, Torn Movie Poster, 1930, American Photographs. Part 1, Plate 13, Collection Center for Creative Photography,

? Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art

the status quo its endorsement implied, oppressed Evans. Despite MOMAs youth, it was still an institution governed by families of great wealth and influence?arbiters of perceived sound judgment. As Evans described it in 1971: "How do you get around Establish ment when something is establishing you? You're established when

you're in these big museums. I find that quite a challenge."17 Evans scholar Alan Trachtenberg said about this ambivalence of Evans: "The museum confers the identity, the status of an artist. But re-.

calling his early lonely rebelliousness, Evans also recalls its free dom, its essential anonymity."18

Evans's nostalgia for this time, prt-American Photographs, when "something was guiding me, was working through me,"19 relates to the early 1930s when he was less conscious or concerned about his status and was more consumed with getting the chance to take pictures and to support himself doing photography during a time when the possibilities of the medium "excited him so much that he sometimes 'thought himself mad.'"20 American Photographs,

according to Evans, "... was like a calling card. It made it. The

book was particularly a passport for me. Sure. It established my style and everything. Oh, yes. And as time went on it became more and more important. More than I realized it established the docu

mentary style as art in photography. For the first time it was influ ential, you see. The Museum is a very influential place."21

With the new museum's valorizing of a new medium, Walter

Benjamin's prediction that photography would extinguish the tra ditional aura of a work of art seemed unlikely.22 Photography was

being invested with that specialness that Evans and many others could not refuse?despite their successful functioning in other numerous, less elevated venues for photography. What began as a

formally-disciplined visual study of ordinary people and vernacu lar expression became a lead-in for MOMA, as Christopher Phillips described it in his essay "The Judgement Seat of Photography": "By revamping older notions of print connoisseurship, transpos ing the ordering categories of art history to a new register, and

confirming the workaday photographer as creative artist,"23




Fig. 5. Walker Evans, Parked Car, Small Town Main Street, 1932, American

Photographs. Part 1, Plate 10, Collection Center for Creative Photography, ? Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fig. 6. Walker Evans, Posed Portraits, New York, 1931, American

Photographs. Part 1, Plate 40, Collection Center for Creative Photography, ? Walker Evans Archive, Metropolitan Museum of Art

photography was "subjected to the transfiguring gaze of art's in stitutional guardian: the museum."24

American Photographs had two distinct components: the ex hibition and the book. For a long time many of us assumed that the two were not very different - that the images were more or less

shared, that the organization was similar, and that the spare de

sign of the book was a print equivalent of the austere gallery wall. With the help of a recent recreation of the original 1938 exhibi tion in the monograph Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye made from

what author Gilles Mora terms "previously unknown and almost

illegible installation photographs," we see that not only do the

images differ (of the 100 prints in the show, 47 were not in the book, and of the 87 images in the book, 33 were not in the show), but that the structures and croppings of those shared are drasti

cally different.25 The split nature of the book, two discrete parts, one more or

less peopled, the other not, is not rigidly upheld in the show. The Hale County, Alabama, pictures are kept more or less together in the exhibit, prefiguring their presentation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The integration of the Hale County pictures in the

published version of American Photographs (if seen after the Evans/

Agee book, which is characterized by fervent verbal narrative) thwarts Evans's ideal of anonymity, a concept key to his intention of allowing each image in American Photographs to interact on

equal footing, for the people and places depicted to stand in for others, to represent a fuller experience, a "universal American feel

ing."26 [See Figs. 4, 5, 6] (It is notable that it is this strategy that Steichen admirably adopted for his The Family of Man, nearly 20 years later, another genetically-titled attempt at universal feeling and probably MOMA's next important, photography-defining book.27)

Critically different from the exhibition is that the book ends with a substantial essay by Evans patron and impresario Lincoln Kirstein. His writing is a dogmatic legitimizing dis course positing "good photography" and Evans as a prime ex

emplar of it. The reader is given an overview of the nature of

photography, its history, its worthy practitioners, its unwor

thy manifestations, and its relation to and independence from the other visual arts. After lengthily ridiculing what he calls "the candid camera," Kirstein describes Evans as the descen

dant of the likes of Mathew Brady and Eugene Atget, among those "certain photographers with a creative attitude and clean eye who have continued to catalogue the facts of their epoch."28 Indeed, the primary status given to 19th-century photogra phers informs MOMA's early aesthetic intuitions regarding pho tography (as well as Evans's own). As Szarkowski states it: "Here one might detect a preference for a plain style of cold

precision and puritan economy: the American daguerreotypists, Mathew Brady and his associates, and the early photographers of the American West produced work that seemed consonant

with the lean, functionalist sensibility of the thirties ...,"29

There are few evaluations of the photography of Walker Evans that do not echo, at least in part, Kirstein's claim that: "The most characteristic single feature of Evans's work is its purity, or even its puritanism."30 [See Fig 7] It is this "clean eye" that helped Evans's

photographs, many so specific to the Depression era, to remain a

perennial cornerstone of MOMAs photography program and to become timeless works of art. Tod Papageorge, photographer, critic, and ally of the museum's enterprise, has observed that American

Photographs is a beautiful, lyric document - causing us to "forget the terrible reality of the time in which the book was made."31

Had the institutional distillation and elevation of Evans's America frustrated the reality side of the photographic equation? Had the "readymade modernist pictorial syntax"32 of photography at MOMA helped enable Evans's imagery "to not merely show a

period, but symbolize it,"33 and even, perhaps, remove it? Had the dialectics of the museum become so integrated into the under

standing of creative photographic practice that it was more and more difficult to extract a sense of the world from which American

Photographs had emerged? Fortunately, and perhaps perversely, much of Walker Evans

output from the 1930s is also controlled by the United States gov ernment. As the "aura" around Evans's work intensified on 53rd

Street in New York, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. was cataloging his images in large, ungainly files, making them accessible to all through cheap reprints. This was a contradiction that Evans himself played out. Under contract with the Farm Se

curity Administration, he gave up the right to his photographs and struggled under Roy Stryker's activist approach to the

department's purpose. And later, during his 20-year stint at For tune magazine, he continued to be plagued by the restrictions of




Fig. 7. Walker Evans, Wooden Church, South Carolina, 1936, American

Photographs. Part 2, Plate 17, Collection Center for Creative Photography, Farm Security Administration Photograph

work-for-hire and perceived outside objectives. Working in what he called "the documentary style," he still refused to identify him self as a social documentar?an: "I don't want to be called that ei

ther. I don't think that's art. What I'm really interested in is art and being an artist."34

Evans's allegiance was, ultimately, to the museological mise en sc?ne. Despite his prolific Fortune years, Evans subordinated

his largest body of work to his more critically acclaimed photo graphs of the 1930s. As Leslie K. Baier recounts: "In the 1960s, unsure of the audience that his Fortune photographs were reach ing, and suddenly finding a future for his photography in the

museum, Evans's reaction was to 'rewrite the past,' emphasize his

work of the thirties, and reject the importance of the Fortune pho tographs out of fear of being labeled a photojournalism"35 MOMA remounted the exhibition and released a second edition o? Ameri can Photographs in 1962. In that same year, John Szarkowski came to MOMA as its new director of photography, carrying a torch for the, by then, obscure photographers of the 19th century. He wanted to reclaim the unmanipulated clarity of early photography that, as he said, adheres to the "precise and lucid description of signifi cant fact."36 His major Walker Evans retrospective of 1971, to which the now old and cynical Evans wisely submitted himself, helped establish Szarkowski's first radical, then exhaustive influence on the interpretation of photographs while rekindling interest in Evans, still apparently a photographer of the '30s. [See Fig. 8] Another austerely designed book was produced, this time the more

expected modernist monograph, a true exhibition catalogue, whose

images were preceded by the curatorial assessment and accompa nied by their titles and dates on facing pages. It was entitled sim

ply Walker Evans.37 This project greatly broadened the Evans lexi con of Depression iconography. The book, even without the Ameri can Photographs images (for MOMA intended to reprint it again), included only 23 of 100 photographs dated 1940 or later. The "retrospective" project, as it was nevertheless called, also rejuve

nated the notion of Evans as an important figure in the art history of photography

By this time MOMA had solidly positioned itself as the arbi ter of "modern art." It sat back and enjoyed its establishment sta tus by, in Russell Lynes' words, "... imitating itself. It had taken to

collecting its own past; it was reviving its own revivals. It was

rediscovering its discoveries - Art Nouveau, Dada and Surrealism;

good old reliables in retrospect -

Picasso, Matisse, Calder, even

Walker Evans for the third time ... ."38 While Szarkowski was cer

tainly taking on Evans freshly, that is, for himself, the pointedness of the institutional lineage becomes almost startling.

The most recent, 1988 reprint o? American Photographs sought to approximate the 1938 edition to the last detail. Its endnote, a

thorough account of the book's publication history by Szarkowski's then heir apparent Peter Galassi, explained those differences which "sadly" remain between it and the first edition. A footnote to the

museum's careful reissuing is the fact that when the copyright ran out on the book in 1975, the East River Press published an unau thorized edition, crudely reproducing a copy of the first edition. As with the Library of Congress, reproductions, though not "mu seum quality," were available and affordable. The nature of pho tography made it possible for these potent images to exist outside the exclusive control or setting of the museum. The 1988 MOMA effort, which included an exhibition version of the book, was an admirable anniversary celebration, but as critic A.D. Coleman com

mented: "Absolutely no effort has been made to contextualize Evans's project, to position it within the half-century of its active life."39 A self-conscious institutional appraisal at this juncture

would have made good sense, especially as it was now the 1980s, a time when art power structures were being critically and health

ily aired out. It is also regrettable that they allowed the original exhibition of American Photographs to fall prey to time, the book selection and sequencing superseding what had been an entirely different expression by Evans. The less codified gallery installa tion, more open, more interactive, with many different images, seemed never to have been.40

In closing, I again quote Alan Trachtenberg: "In Evans's work of the 1930s the sensibility of modernism enters decisively into American photography, and it does not exaggerate to say that more than anyone else, Evans pointed the way toward a contemporary

Fig. 8. Richard Avedon, John Szarkowski, Curator, New York City, 7-30-75, Collection Center for Creative Photography, ? 1976 Richard Avedon




Fig. 9. Walker Evans, Graveyard, Houses and Steel Mill, Bethlehem,

Pennsylvania, 1935, Collection Center for Creative Photography, Farm Security Administration Photograph

art of photography.41 While Trachtenberg's claim may be large, ifit is to be made, then The Museum of Modern Art's dedicated pa tronage of Evans is equally responsible for photography's aesthetic ascension. By situating Walker Evans in the context of art from its first years and throughout its history, it provided itself and the world watching with a bellwether and subsequent standard for modernist photography: "Classic, understated, immaculate."42

Trachtenberg allies himself with Evans's own preference for the museological in discussing a particular photograph by Evans [See Fig. 9]: "It is tempting to name what seems the purest, least

written-upon version of the [Evans] image as the truest: the exhi bition version within the mise en sc?ne of Evans's 1971 book."43 Because, as Evans himself admitted regarding the 1971 MOMA

retrospective exhibition and publication: "To find acceptance is quite a thing."44

Notes

1. Walker Evans, American Photographs (New York: The Museum of Modern

Art, 1938). The exhibition took place at the Museum from September 28

November 18, 1938. 2. The publications are: Walker Evans, American Photographs (New York: The

Museum of Modern Art, 1938); American Photographs, Reprint (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1962); and American Photographs, Fiftieth

Anniversary Edition (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1988). The

corresponding exhibitions took place at The Museum of Modern Art, New

York: September 28-November 18,1938; June 8,1962-February 14,1963; and January 19-April 11, 1989.

3. Walker Evans: Photographs of 19th Century Houses, an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 16-December 8,1933.

4. Hart Crane, The Bridge, A Poem (Paris: Black Sun Press, 1930). Illustrated

with three untitled and undated photographs by Evans of the Brooklyn Bridge. 5. Originally an assignment for Fortune magazine with photographs by Evans

and text by James Agee. It was not accepted for publication by the maga zine but was later produced in book form as James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1941).

6. Carleton Beals and Walker Evans, The Crime of Cuba (Philadelphia and

London: J.B. Lippincott, cl933). With photographs of Cuba by Evans.

7. Evans was a Farm Security Administration photographer from 1935 to 1937.

8. Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye, (New York:

Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 161. 9. Including: Walker Evans, "The Reappearance of Photography," Hound &

Horn 5, no. 1 (October-December 1931): 125-28. 10. Bill Ferris, "A Visit with Walker Evans," in Images of the South: Visits with

Eudora Welty and Walker Evans (Memphis: Center for Southern Folklore,

1977), 30. 11. Leslie Katz, "Interview with Walker Evans," Art in America 59, no. 2 (April

1971): 83. 12. John Szarkowski, "Photography," in The Museum of Modem Art, New York:

The History and the Collection (New York: Harry . Abrams, 1984), 463.

13. Paul Radin and James Johnson Sweeney, African Folktales & Sculpture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1952). Many of Evans's photographs from the Afri can art project are reproduced in this volume. A large collection of original prints are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

14. Paul Cummings, "Tape-Recorded Interview with Walker Evans, October

13, 1971" typescript, Archives of American Art, as quoted in Alan

Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew

Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 237. 15. Beaumont Newhall's Photography: A Short Critical History (New York: The

Museum of Modern Art, 1938) was followed by an expanded version, The

History of Photography: 1839 to the Present Day (New York: The Museum of

Modern Art, 1949). A revised fifth edition of that classic text was pub lished by MOMA in 1982.

16. Beaumont Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography (Boston: Bull

finch Press, 1993), 56. 17. Cummings, "Interview," in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photo

graphs, 238. 18. Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 239. 19. As quoted in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs, 239.

20. John Szarkowski, Walker Evans (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,

1971), 13. 21. Cummings, "Interview," in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photo

graphs, 238. 22. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduc

tion," Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221.

23. Christopher Phillips, "The Judgement Seat of Photography," October 22

(Fall 1982): 28. 24. Ibid., 30.

25. The 1938 exhibition installation layout is reconstructed in Mora and Hill,

Hungry Eye, 162-97 (reconstruction credited to Ed Grazda, p. 352). 26. Gilbert Seldes, "No Soul in the Photograph," Esquire 10, no. 6 (December

1938): 121, 242-43, as quoted in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photo

graphs, 238. 27. Edward Steichen, The Family of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art,

1955). 28. Lincoln Kirstein, "Photographs of America: Walker Evans," in Evans, Ameri

can Photographs (1938), 191.

29. Szarkowski, "Photography," in The Museum of Modern Art, 464.

30. Kirstein, "Photographs," in American Photographs, 197.

31. Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 1981), 7.

32. Phillips, "Judgement Seat," 46.

33. Peter C. Bunnell, "An Introduction to Evans Work and His Recollections," New Republic 175, no. 20 (13 November 1976): 26.

34. Ferris, "A Visit," in Images of the South, 34.

35. Lesley K. Baier, Walker Evans at FORTUNE, 1945-1965 (Wellesley: Wellesley

College Museum, 1977), 6. 36. Szarkowski, Walker Evans, 17.

37. The monograph, Walker Evans (see note 20), accompanied the exhibition of

the same name, which took place at MOMA from January 27-April 12,1971. 38. Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of The Museum of

Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 409.

39. A.D. Coleman, [review section], Modern Photography 53, no. 7 Only 1989), 25.

40. For an analysis of the 1938 exhibition and catalogue, see Mora and Hill, "American Photographs," in Hungry Eye, 160-97.

41. Trachtenberg, "The Artist of the Real," in The Presence of Walker Evans

(Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 1978), 20.

42. Anne Tucker, "American Documentary Styles," in The Art of Photography, ed. Mike Weaver (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 298.

43. Alan Trachtenberg, "From Image to Story: Reading the File," in Document

ing America, 1935-1943, eds. Carl Fleischauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Ber

keley: University of California Press, 1988), 51. The photograph in ques tion is Graveyard. House, and Steel Mill. Bethlehem. Pennsylvania. No

vember 1935.

44. Cummings, "Interview," in Trachtenberg, Reading American Photo

graphs, 239.



Documents

The Museological Mise en Scène: Walker Evans, "American Photographs", and The Museum of Modern Art