The Genius of Photography 摄影演义后传- 16
In the course of our 170 year relationship, photography has delighted us, served us, moved us, outraged us and occasionally disappointed us. But mainly, it has intrigued us by showing the secret strangeness that lies beneath the world of appearances. And that is photography's true genius.
When he saw this work, Evans put aside his hand-held camera and began working like Atget with an old-fashioned, large format view camera. It’s slowed him down, but made him look more closely.
“If we try to understand what Walker Evans took from Atget, it would have been an understanding of how the object to things people make, how those things are immensely evocative of the lives of the people to whom they are attached. All the way through Atget, every tablecloth, every pillow, every pair of shoes, is its owner. And Evans saw this, and extended it directly into his own work.”
In 1935, Evans along with a number of other leading photographers was commissioned to produce propaganda images for the Farm Securities Agency, set up to ease the effects of the Depression in rural America.
“Since these photographs were taken at the behest of the government in order to support government relief efforts, there's an obvious strategy involved to portray the government in a very positive light. Not only the government, more important than the government were the recipients of relief. So the most famous examples occur with the idealization of the dust bowl---ur refugees, for example, in the photography of Dorothea Lange, in which in the 6 photographs in series, she precedes to reduce the size of the family, which is identified, you know captions are 7 people down to 3 young children, one of whom is an infant. And thereby the family suddenly conforms to middle class standards on family size.”
One of Evans' classic images shows the gulf that separated him from mainstream FSA photography.
“The great documentary portrait by Walker Evans in the 1930s is the one of Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper's wife in Alabama in 1936. And she showed against the weather-boarded house that she lived in, and she, her face’s as weathered as the wood. You can see that her eyes are screwed up against fairly fierce sudden light. And it's, the same, sort of fierceness of the camera lens. There’s no Vaseline involved, and no muslin. It's just sheer direct fact.”
Vocabulary:
large format: Large format describes large photographic films, large cameras, view camera (including pinhole cameras) and processes that use a film or digital sensor, generally 4 x 5 inches or larger.
at the behest of: because someone has asked for something or ordered something to happen
The committee was set up at the behest of the president.
dust bowl: The Dust Bowl, or the dirty thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940), caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation or other techniques to prevent erosion.
muslin: Muslin is a type of finely-woven cotton fabric, introduced to
Europe from the Middle East in the 17th century.
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