For several years in the late 1930s, the photographer Walker Evans turned the New York subway system into a mobile portrait studio. His subjects didn't know it. Seated across from him, people couldn't see the camera strapped to his chest under a bulky overcoat. Evans was almost equally in the dark. Although he controlled the shutter, he could never be sure what his lens would capture. He referred to the mechanism as an "impersonal fixed-recording machine" and claimed he was trying to record the faces of commuters "without any human selection".
Several of these portraits are now on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, included in an impressively comprehensive retrospective of the American photographer's work. These pictures simultaneously show the promise and the limitations of Evans' subway project, and reveal in microcosm the genius and shortcomings of his influential approach to photography.
From early in his career, following a youthful fling with European Modernism, Evans styled himself as a chronicler of the American vernacular. He photographed Main Street USA in the style of picture postcards, emulated product photography in his documentation of American hardware, and took family photos with the clumsiness of snapshots. In all of this, there was an effort to distance himself from the elitism of fine art in order to capture an unvarnished reality from the inside out. The depersonalization of his fixed-recording machine was an extreme case of his impersonations, his most explicit effort to evade his own taste.
The photographs Evans made stand out for their ordinariness. Without them, we would surely know less of midcentury America. But the images are tricky. Although their vernacular quality isn't exactly an affectation, neither is it entirely genuine. Casual family snapshots are carefully framed, automatic subway portraits selected by his sharp eye. Like all great art, Evans' photographs are contrived. Unlike most great art, the manner of his contrivance might easily be mistaken for candor.
Through Evans we can see the midcentury American vernacular, but only if we learn to see through Evans the American vernacular photographer.
