I. American Photographs: Evans in Middletown

When Evans was officially hired in October 1935 as an Information Specialist by the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration, his duties were described as follows: “Under the general supervision of the Chief of the Historical Section with wide latitude for the exercise of independent judgement and decision as Senior Information Specialist to carry out special assignments in the field; collect, compile and create photographic material to illustrate factual and interpretive news releases and other informational material upon all problems, progress and activities of the Resettlement Administration.”¹ Evans was to make liberal use of his right to exercise “independent judgement” during his time with the RA, and he perpetually resisted the idea that his purpose there was to gather illustrations for the promotion of the RA’s (that is, the federal government’s New Deal) programs. While considering a position with the RA in the spring of 1935, he jotted down those things he would require of his employer, including the “guarantee of one-man performance,” and what he would provide, adding that he should not be asked to do anything more in the way of political propaganda: “[I] Mean never [to] make photographic statements for the government or do photographic chores for gov or anyone in gov, no matter how powerful—this is pure record not propaganda. The value and, if you like, even the propaganda value for the government lies in the record itself which in the long run will prove an intelligent and farsighted thing to have done. NO POLITICS whatever.” (Evans 1938)

Because his pictures had been issued by the agency with policy-approved captions for the past three years, Evans felt the need in 1938 to distance himself from that establishment, as well as the world of commercial publishing, by prefacing American Photographs with this statement: “The responsibility for the selection of the pictures used in this book has rested with the author, and the choice has been determined by his opinion: therefore they are presented without sponsorship or connection with the policies, aesthetic or political, of any of the institutions, publications or government agencies for which some of the work has been done.”² Stryker’s business was to provide informative images to the mass media, and he and Evans would always disagree about the most appropriate vehicle for the latter’s photographs, as well as the definition of “documentary.” But when the photography project of the RA began, the two men were able to agree on its primary subject: American history as exemplified by life in the average American town. Evans’s vision for documenting American life had begun to form much earlier; a letter drafted to his friend Ernestine Evans, an editor at J. B. Lippincott, in February of 1934, makes clear his aspirations:

What do I want to do? … I know now is the time for picture books. An American city is the best, Pittsburgh better than Washington. I know more about such a place. I would want to visit several besides Pittsburgh before deciding. Something perhaps smaller. Toledo, Ohio, maybe. Then I’m not sure a book of photos should be identified locally. American city is what I’m after… People, all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out. Automobiles and the automobile landscape. Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, the city street atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women’s clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay…³

The two men could find common ground in part due to the widespread influence of the 1929 publication Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture by Robert and Helen Lynd, professors of sociology at Columbia and Sarah Lawrence, respectively. A 550-page field investigation by social anthropologists with subject headings including “What Middletown does to get its living” and “The houses in which Middletown lives,” this pioneering project attempted an objective analysis of life in a small Midwestern American city (Muncie, Indiana). The Lynds’ study was hailed as a very accessible report that was most appealing because it made “no attempt to prove anything” but simply recorded “what was observed.” The Lynds introduced their topic by saying their goal “was to study synchronously the interwoven trends that are the life of a small American city. A typical city, strictly speaking, does not exist, but the city studied was selected a shaving many features in common to a wide group of communities.” (Lynd 1929, 3)

The “Outline Memorandum” that Evans prepared in October 1935, probably at Stryker’s request, laying out plans for an eight-week automobile trip through the Southeast, makes reference to Middletown and presents thoughts similar to the photographer’s musings of 1934:

First objective, Pittsburgh and vicinity, one week; photography, documentary in style, of industrial subjects, emphasis on housing and home life of working-class people… Ohio Valley: rural architecture, including the historical, contemporary “Middletown” subjects; Cincinnati [sic] housing; notes on style of Victorian prosperous period… Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois river towns, gather typical documents, main streets, etc., in passing. Ditto Mississippi river towns. Select one of these towns, such as Hannibal, Missouri, for more thorough treatment, if time allows.⁴

This document goes on to list antebellum plantation architecture in Natchez, Mississippi; small rural French towns in Teche Parish, Louisiana; industrial themes in Birmingham, Alabama; and a cotton plantation in South Carolina, as objectives of the proposed trip for gathering still photography of a “general sociological nature.” In early 1936, one of Middletown’s authors had a chance to directly affect the RA’s Photography Section: Stryker showed Robert Lynd, a former Columbia colleague, some RA pictures and asked for his opinion while lunching with him in New York. The result was a “shooting script” for “things which should be photographed as American Background,” issued by Stryker to his team of photographers. The script contains an extensive listing of items like “People on and off the job,” “How do people look?,” “The wall decoration in homes as an index to the different income groups and their reactions,” and “A photographic study of use of leisure time in various income groups.”⁵

Once Evans was officially on staff, his first trip under Stryker’s direction seems to have been an extended fall visit to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where steel mills, workers’ housing, parading legionnaires, and elaborate gravestones (figs. 1, 2 and 3) were his subjects. Between November 1935 and April 1936, Evans made two lengthy road trips that would account for the bulk of his entire production for the RA and many of the 169 mid-thirties pictures that follow this essay. From November to mid-January, here turned to industrial centers in Pennsylvania, finally spending some time in Pittsburgh, and went on to Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, following to some extent the course outlined in the memorandum above. In February 1936, he left again, with a completely Southern itinerary that would take him through many small cities, some of them renowned for ante-bellum architecture and Civil War battles, in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia.

In the spring of 1936, Stryker approved a furlough for Evans to work on a Fortune story with James Agee. This leave for mid-July through mid-September allowed Evans to return to the “middle south” with Agee to prepare “an article on cotton tenantry in the United States, in the form of a photographic and verbal record of the daily lives and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers” (figs. 4, 5, 6 and 7). (Agee 1941, viii) According to the terms of Stryker’s arrangement with Fortune’s art editor, the pictures Evans produced on this job would become the property of the RA after the magazine had run the finished essay in a fall issue.

Once Evans returned from this trip south, during which he and Agee documented the lives of the Burroughs, Fields, and Tengle families in Alabama (see Bud Fields with His Wife and Burrough’s Family), he spent September and October printing his pictures and preparing presentations for both Fortune and Stryker.⁶ Stryker again talked about a New England trip, on which he planned to accompany the photographer, but it did not materialize, and Evans was once more sent to the South, this time to photograph the catastrophe of flooding in Arkansas and Tennessee. An unusual and demanding assignment for Evans, this trip of late January and February 1937 was made with another RA photographer, Edwin Locke, and required that he spend considerable time in the affected area, photographing the flood victims and their temporary shelters.

This would be his last travel for the RA, an agency that was absorbed into the Farm Security Administration at about this time. Evans’s contributions to the RA’s documentation of Depression-era America had essentially been obtained between the summer of 1935 and the spring of 1936, a period of less than a year. The Alabama pictures made while on leave to Fortune would become his best-known photographs and, ironically, those most closely identified with his work as a New Deal photographer.

The events generated by the Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1938 could be viewed as the culmination of a highly productive period made possible by the patronage of the federal government. The sequences of images that appeared in the exhibition and book of American Photo-graphs, though composed of different selections and gleaned from a decade of the photographer’s work, might just as appropriately have appeared under the title of “Middletown.” In fact, Kirstein refers to the Lynds’ Middletown in his American Photographs essay, suggesting that, although Evans’s work should not be considered merely “illustrative accompaniment,” a study such as theirs “might have been more effective had it also been plotted in visual terms.” (Kirstein 1938, 196) An article by Anthony Westen titled “Middletown and Main Street,” one of the most insightful contemporary comments on Evans’s subject matter, appeared in Architectural Review to mark the publication of American Photographs. (West 1939, 218-20)

A closer look at two little-known RA images—one that appeared in both exhibition formats and one that appeared only in the book—provides a glimpse of how much the exhibitions and publication differed and of the way in which Evans went about editing his own work. Appearing almost in the very middle of the New York installation of American Photographs were two 1937 images of Arkansas flood refugees. One of them—a young African American woman asleep under a quilt in a heavy, metal-frame bed—is found in an almost square Getty print bearing an incomplete MoMA loan number. A second image of almost the same size—a person who looks more like an African American man, partially con-sealed behind a boldly patterned makeshift curtain—is also found at the Getty, but this print, apparently of the same vintage, does not possess a loan number or label. Both images have been severely cropped from the original negative.⁷ Prints of the two images hung as pendants in the New York show between a photograph of a poor Cuban family from 1933 and a picture of the Tengle family in Hale County, Alabama, singing hymns. The installation list for the circulating version of American Photographs calls for these two images to appear together, only this time toward the end of the show, in group XV (of eighteen groupings specified), where they would be part of a larger selection of seven pictures, including three Alabama tenant farmer images, two Cuban pictures of workingmen and women, and views of factories in Louisiana and wooden stores in Mississippi.

For the book, however, Evans chose a vertically oriented print from another negative of the sleeping woman mentioned above. This image (figs. 8), which might seem more invasive than intimate, is even more startling and unorthodox than the first. It presents the weary flood victim at bedside level, awake but nestled under the quilt. Below her on the floor of the old cotton warehouse that is supplying emergency shelter are a few items of clothing and a bedpan. Occurring at almost the exact center of the book—that is, as plate forty-four in a sequence of eighty-seven images—it falls between a van Gogh-like interior entitled Hudson Street Boarding House Detail, New York and a portrait of three working-class neighbors passing the time together in People in Summer, New York State Town. As comparative material from this winter of 1937 Arkansas assignment, three other prints in the Getty collection depict African American women displaced by the flood and huddled in or near a bed due to cold and illness. Like the two images chosen for the MoMA show, these three reflect substantial cropping of the negatives in an effort to close in on a single figure and eliminate the barn like interior of this uncomfortable temporary home.⁸ Always after portraits of “the anonymous people” of Middletown, Evans seems to have taken full advantage of the unusual vulnerability of these residents of Forrest City, Arkansas.

Evans had company on this RA assignment, which must have been one of the hardest emotionally as well as technically of his career. The report submitted to Stryker by his more communicative colleague, Edwin Locke, gives an immediate picture of the conditions the two men found and the way they attempted to record them. It also con-firms Evans’s perfectionist nature, his persistent determination to get the right picture, and the reasons why Roy Stryker, like Tom Mabry, valued his work so highly. The handwritten letter on hotel stationery reads in part:

My God, we are tired tonight! Got up at 6 this morning, worked until 5:30 PM, made the 6:20 PM train back to Memphis, having covered the refugee camps as well as we could without flashes. And now a word about the camps: L White camp (about 2 miles away from Negro camp—we covered this twice on foot with equipment): well run, adequate tent space, good (regular army) food. A detachment of soldiers from Fort Leavenworth are running the outfit along with the CCC… The Negro camp: Overcrowded. There are many more negroes than whites affected by flood in this area. Found 11 in one tent. They are not “happy-go-lucky” about it, but dazed, apathetic, and hopeless. There is a good deal of illness: excruciating coughs, pneumonia and influenza cases laying in a dark cotton warehouse. I shot in there with the Leica, but Walker said it was too dark. He bought photoflashes and shot with the 4x5, but is afraid that the exposures were wrong. He will undoubtedly want to go back…⁹

Evans and Stryker parted ways, mostly because of the bureaucratic requirements that Stryker adhered to. Working under difficult conditions was certainly not some-thing the photographer shied away from, particularly when he was after the archetypal portrait of “Everyman” that he treasured. In pursuit of this goal, for his next major series Evans would contrive to photograph only by remote shutter release while riding the New York subway in winter.

1. Memorandum draft by Walker Evans, reproduced in Walker Evans at Work, (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 112. ↩︎

2. Walker Evans to Ernestine Evans, unfinished two-page letter in black ink on hotel stationery, dated Feb. 1934, first published in Walker Evans at Work, 98. This letter is part of the Evans Collection at the Getty (JPGM84.XG.963.42). ↩︎

3. From a review by W. B. Shaw, quoted in Book Review Digest: Books of l929 (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1930), 591. ↩︎

4. Walker Evans to Roy Stryker, “Outline Memorandum,” ca. Oct.1935, Stryker Papers. Also published in Walker Evans at Work, 113. ↩︎

5. Roy Stryker to all FSA (then RA) photographers, outline for “Suggestions recently made by Robert Lyndf or things which should be photo-graphed as ‘American Background,’” dated by Stryker to early 1936, first published in Carver, Just Before the War, n.p. ↩︎

6. For more background on this Alabama series and a discussion of two photograph albums in the collection of the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress thought to beEvans’s “first draft” for Fortune, seeJudith Keller and Beverly Brannan, “Walker Evans: Two Albums in the Library of Congress,” History of Photography 19:1 (Spring 1995). ↩︎

7. See Maddox, Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938, ill. nos. 432-33. ↩︎

8. See Maddox, 429-31, for a more complete look at these three negatives. ↩︎

9. Edwin Locke to Roy Stryker, six-page letter on hotel stationery, Feb. 4, 1937, Stryker Papers. Seven days after this letter, the two photographers are still in Memphis; Locke notifies Stryker that Evans is ill with a serious case of the flu but refuses to be taken to the hospital. Locke to Stryker, two-page letter on notecards, Feb. 11,1937, Stryker Papers. ↩︎