Walker Evans and Soundings at MOMA

I went to MOMA to see their take on "sound art", and a 75th anniversary commemorative show of Walker Evan's "American Photographs".    The sound art show was mostly inconsequential and annoyingly simplistic.   For example, one artist had taken a copy of a Xenakis score, and drawn lines from each note to the center point of the paper.   That's it....   If you want to extrapolate artistic meaning from that exercise, feel free to...   Others continued along the same lines, mixing contemporary art cliches with abandon...   I did like one work, consisting of 1,500 small sized speakers arranged on a wall, with varying frequencies of pink noise that changed as you moved around.

On the other hand, the Walker Evans show was wonderful.  I know many of the photographs form the original catalog, "American Photographs".  What I was not prepared for was the richness of the silver gelatin prints.   The show (one large room) had a copy of the catalog at hand; comparing the prints directly with the reproductions in the catalog showed that the reproduced images were  feeble, pale imitations of the originals.   I tend to think of Walker Evans as a "documentary" style photographer, inheriting the tradition of Atget in taking photographs of the ordinary.   These prints showed Evans as a sensual and subtle visual artist as well, working in the medium of black and white photography.

A pale imitation:

I like the show so much, I went back to see it again a few days later.