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The Work of Praise
August 26, 2006    File under: Lomography / Photography

In Friday's New York Times, Michael Kimmelman writes of a new exhibit of Walker Evans' photographs, reproduced digitally and printed in larger formats:

I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs, now at the UBS Art Gallery, are so seductive and luxurious — velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic — that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.

For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.

I take the general point, but this raises a simple question, whether Kimmelman has read Agee's part of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a hard-wrought work of praise full of rich detail, to which Evans' photographs are the perfect complement:

The mirror is so far corrupted that it is rashed with gray, iridescent in parts, and in all its reflections a deeply sad thin zinc-to-platinum, giving to its framings an almost incalculably ancient, sweet, frail, and piteous beauty, such as may be seen in tintypes of family groups among studio furnishings or heard in nearly exhausted jazz records made by very young, insane, devout men who were to destroy themselves, in New Orleans, in the early nineteen twenties.

This luxuriation of words—which, Agee, at the outset of the book, shows is a measure of the difficulty with which he, from another place and privilege, approaches his subjects—is this not both a depiction of the textural complexities (if not the commodoty richness) of the world of the poor and a kind of consolatory richness?

Is it not the smallness these lives had in the national consciousness write large, given a richness of attention that would amplify their visibility?

Is this not a discomforting beauty?

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only insite it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.

Are you listening?

Posted by Jake Adam York at August 26, 2006 8:20 AM