CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 1/5/2016

Walker Evans: Aperture Masters of Photography

Snapped on the streets of Lower Manhattan in 1929, Walker Evans' amazingly contemporary "Girl on Fulton Street" is reproduced from Aperture's redesigned and expanded new edition of the classic Evans Masters of Photography overview. Essayist David Campany writes on the generosity of Evans' idiom: "There was no forced technique. No gimmicks. No strong claims, either, to an independent art or to the persuasion associated with journalism. It was a thoughtful, reflective disposition towards photography and how it might describe everyday life and one's perception of it. Evans stood back from the white heat of progress and to the side of the mainstream values of twentieth-century America. This has also made Evans the most perplexing of photographers. The unadorned plainness of his pictures suggests 'straight speaking,' but it also leaves them open to interpretation. He understood the importance of that rich and uncertain space between the photo as document and the photo as artwork. He understood it far better than his critics and commentators who would later defend him as either artist or journalist."