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"The Passion of Walker Evans"

By: Daniel Mark Epstein, New Criterion, March 1, 2000

America's infatuation with photography has thrived upon its easy accessibility. By 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, George Eastman had made the roll-film camera so cheap that soon no family reunion or Sunday picnic need ever lack a "photo artist" to immortalize it. Amateur camera societies and photo exhibitions sprang up in cities and towns from coast to coast. And while professionals like Alfred Stieglitz fought for "the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression," arguing that the photographer's gift, like the painter's, was privileged vision, the larger public remained quite content with the belief that one person's photo was pretty much as good as another's.

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Dorothea Lange: The Photographer As Agricultural Sociologist

By Linda Gordon

To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images, and among them, Dorothea Lange’s are the most influential. Although many do not know her name, her photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of that economic disaster. Her pictures exerted great force in their own time, helping shape 1930s and 1940s Popular Front representational and artistic sensibility, because the Farm Security Administration (FSA), her employer, distributed the photographs aggressively through the mass media. If you watch the film The Grapes of Wrath with a collection of her photographs next to you, you will see the influence.1 Lange’s commitment to making her photography speak to matters of injustice was hardly unique—thousands of artists, writers, dancers, and actors were trying to connect with the vibrant grass-roots social movements of the time. They formed a cultural wing of the Popular Front, a politics of liberal-Left unity in support of the New Deal.

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THEORY - "Interview with Walker Evans"
Interview with Walker Evans
Conducted by Paul Cummings
In Connecticut
October 13, 1971
In New York City
December 23, 1971


The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Walker Evans conducted by Paul Cummings for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. The interview took place at the home of Walker Evans in Connecticut on October 13, 1971 and in his apartment in New York City on December 23, 1971.

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