Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand were certainly of great importance for the development of photography in the USA in the early 20th century. But arguably no one has had as much of an impact on photographers who followed (and today) as Walker Evans. One can only agree with Svetlana Alpers when she writes that Evans, born in 1903 in Saint Louis, Missouri, invented America in the first place.
Stephen Shore, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, they all walk in his footsteps, because he is the one who sharpened the eye for the everyday, the ordinary and opened it up in the first place: to the wet streets, crooked houses, dusty furniture that you can find on your immediately recognizes the images as quintessentially American, even if there are streets, houses and cars elsewhere in the world. Not to mention the farming families in the southern United States and the people on the New York subway that Evans portrayed.
It is therefore generally to be welcomed when Walker Evans is dedicated to a book. There aren’t many good books (or essays) on photography, and so the same ones are cited again and again: those by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag.
Walker Evans shows the “Salon in Muriel Draper’s Apartment”, New York, 1934.
(Photo: Heather Johnson; Walker Evans/Schirmer/Mosel)
Art historian Svetlana Alpers, whose “Walker Evans. America. Life and Art” is now available in the translation by Wolfgang Kemp, makes new connections by detailing Walker Evans’ relationship with Gustave Flaubert, having previously only written about painting and dedicated to Charles Baudelaire. Alpers describes Evans’ photography as particularly “literary”. But it is up to Wolfgang Kemp to explain in his epilogue what she actually means by that: the photographs are “narrative”, i.e. narrative, and they always convey a story.
Walker Evans: Man in white suit and straw hat in front of a newspaper kiosk, Havana, 1933.
(Photo: Walker Evans/Schirmer/Mosel)
In other chapters of her book, which looks less like a biography than a collection of essays, Alpers looks at Walker Evans’ stay in Cuba, his way of post-processing images, his time at the magazine fortune and his “withdrawal inward”.
But if you want to get that far and up to the extensive and excellently printed picture part, you have to put in some effort, and that is due to the translation. Wolfgang Kemp is an art historian, photography expert, and wrote the foreword to Alpers’ book “Art as Description”, which was published in German in 1985. But even though he received the Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose in 2018, he is not a translator. Some of his German text remains stuck to the English sentence structure and terminology to the point of incomprehensibility.
Svetlana Alpers: Walker Evans. America. Life and work. Translated by Wolfgang Kemp. Schirmer/Mosel, Munich 2021, 416 pages, 48 euros.
(Photo: Schirmer/Mosel)
It is said that Walker Evans and James Agee’s “Let us now praise famous men” begins with a “rhapsodic outpouring of desire to go to bed with the sister of the man they were living with”. What on earth is a rhapsodic spout? The same page reads, “Agee was good with people and opened up avenues for Evans with the camera.” Apart from the fact that nothing in this sentence resembles a German sentence apart from the individual words, the subject-object relationship is also wrong. After all, Agee is the author, not the man with the camera.
There are examples like this on every page. The quality of Alpers’ text can only be assessed to a limited extent, but the impression prevails that someone would rather put something in dry terms here than do what Walker Evans did: open your eyes and show what you see.