Walker Evans and the Bad Plus in Vancouver

There was a terrific show of the work of the American photographer Walker Evans at the Vancouver Art Gallery.   Evans is one of the greatest of photographers, and the show, which was very large, did full justice to his entire career.   Evans is most known for his iconic images of tenant farmers created for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930's, but his whole career is filled with all kinds of different photographic projects.   And the show was curated so that you got a chance to see good examples of many these projects.   I loved the photos that he took in the NY subway with his clandestine camera. and the late photographs he called "color accidents".   And I loved the fact that he was a collector of all kinds of things  (I have a book that focuses entirely on the influence of his postcard collecting on his photographs.)

One of the reasons for going to see a photography show is to see the actual original prints of the photographs, which, in many cases, surpass the quality of what you can see even in today's supremely high quality reproductions in books.   (I've talked about this in this blog before...)  Seeing Evans's prints in the original versions can be extremely satisfying, although according to the article cited below he was notoriously haphazard in his approach to printing.   There were many wonderful original silver gelatin prints in this show.   There were also a number of inkjet prints.   But Evans died in the mid 1970's, when there were no inkjet printers, so he can't have made them.   So some investigation on the internet revealed that in fact his long time assistant and executor John Hill has been digitally scanning the original negatives and creating new prints.   This brings up all kinds of questions, which were cogently discussed by Michael Kimmelman in the NY Times in 2006 in reference to an exhibition which juxtaposed the original prints with the newly created digital ones.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/arts/design/25evan.html

I personally don't have a huge problem with the digital prints, though I always like the silver gelatin ones more.   Where I do have a problem is when the photographs are enlarged to a much larger size than Evans ever made, up to three feet long, for example.  I agree with Kimmelman that there is something about the size of a photograph which determines a certain kind of concentration or focus, and that somehow I concentrate better and see more in a smaller scale photograph than in a large one.  (Like the difference between a string quartet and a string orchestra.)   Kimmelman mentions the concept of a photograph as a musical score, where the original negative can be interpreted in various ways in the printing process.   There is some truth to this analogy, but, like musical scores, there is also a sense in which fidelity to the text and to the artist's original intentions is important, and a print which violates the original intentions in an extreme manner is annoying. (I would have appreciated it if the exhibit had made some reference to the nature of the different printing techniques, other than specifying them.)

You can actually go to the Library of Congress website and see examples of where they have scanned both the print Evans made and the original negative.

Another interesting idea that the Evans exhibit brings up is the extent to which any image can function political document.  The FSA photographs were created as propaganda for the US government, made in order to convince the nation of the need to address the poverty and social problems in rural America.   Evans was hired for the project, but stated that he wanted no part of any government agenda (in spite of the fact that he was clearly sympathetic with the government's agenda.)   So he went ahead to make the pictures that he wanted, while at the same time fulfilling the needs of his position.   So he wanted his pictures of poverty to be aesthetically pleasing in whatever sense that might have been for him.  Again I agree with Kimmelman;  to me his aesthetic is one that clearly relates to the French photographer Atget, in that there is a fascinating kind of directness and plainness which somehow allows the essence of what is photographed to emerge.  But this is done with a great deal of craft.    You don't feel an editorializing voice.   And many of the photographs that he made for the FSA are clearly nothing to do with his government mission, like the wonderful photographs of movie posters.

Here are a few Evans photographs:

We observed the really, really bad day of January 20th by going to see the jazz trio the Bad Plus in North Vancouver.   The Bad Plus are nominally a jazz trio; piano, bass and drums.   But their repertoire ranges from Ornette Coleman tunes to Cindy Lauper to Milton Babbitt to Igor Stravinsky.   But most of their repertoire is their own compositions.
They very much reminded me of the Vijay Iyer Trio, with their disjunct and modernist transformations of standard musical gestures.  And they have a kind of quirky sense of humor, as well.  Sometimes you really could not really define what it was you were hearing.   (I think that's a good thing.)  Some of the tunes I liked quite a bit, and others seemed a bit perfunctory and ordinary.   I would happily go to hear them again.