The early photographs of Walker Evans are now so familiar that it is easy to forget how radically different they seemed at the time, and to take their subtle influence for granted, or, now that the collective longing appears to be for nothing so much as to be relieved of the burden of thinking or remembering at all, to fail to discern it altogether. By the late 1950s, Evans was hovering on extinction. A decade-long resuscitation began with the 1960 reissue of his collaborative effort with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which galvanised a new generation of social idealists and photographers. Then came the reissue of his book American Photography in 1962; a MoMA exhibition, in 1966, of subway photographs he'd taken in the 1930s and 1940s but had never shown; and, finally, a second MoMA retrospective in 1971. By the mid 1970s, there were very few serious photographers whose work didn't in some way allude to Evans's sensibility, or 'person'. (Of the work of Eugène Atget, his most important photographic influence, Evans wrote, in 1931: 'His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not "the poetry of the street" or "the poetry of Paris", but the projection of Atget's person' - suggesting that, at the age of 28, Evans had a remarkably sophisticated understanding not only of Atget's work but also of what he himself was striving to articulate.)

LRB 5 February 2004 | PDF Download