TAGG John. Melancholy Realism: Walker Evan's Resistance To Meaning

Melancholy Realism: Walker Evans's Resistance to Meaning
Author(s): John Tagg

Source: Narrative, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Jan., 2003), pp. 3-77
Published by: Ohio State University Press
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John Tagg
Walker
Realism:
Melancholy
to Meaning
Resistance
Evans's
in the
"It is characteristic of philosophical writing," wrote Walter Benjamin,
opening sentence of a book he was misled enough to hope would bring him acade
mic preferment, "that it must continually confront the question of representation"
(27). We might equally substitute "historical" here for the adjective "philosophical,"
though no doubt itwill be insisted that this view is itself dated. Be that as itmay, "the
question of representation" survives both the 1920s and the 1970s, if not as the slo
gan of a particular project, then as the marker of what, like some colonial adminis
trator, Paul de Man once called "local difficulties"; local difficulties, one might add,
events of representation that
that are only too apt to turn into awkward events?the
a
as
to the problematics of
"from
de
Man
historical
definition
shift,
it,
put
compel
a
on
to
The
is
handle
these
how
events, even while
then,
get
reading" (ix).
difficulty,
we also have to worry about how they handle us?their
subjects, that is, even those
who cannot reconcile themselves to being in their grip.
What concerns me here is the photographic event: not just the production of
meaning at a specific moment, in a specific cultural field, but above all the relation
the photograph is driven to establish to meaning and to the possibility of photo
graphic narration. The moment is that of the second New Deal in the United States:
precisely amoment at which new technologies of photomechanical
reproduction en
abled a further quantum leap in the proliferation and social dispersion of photo
a threshold that marked
the emergence
of a new
images, crossing
graphic
social, and political. The status of photography in this economy
economy?visual,
constituted a particular knot, threading together those dreams of transparency, effi
ciency,
and
accelerated
exchange
that marked
the
instrumentalization
of
photo
in social administration as in commercialized

in
communications,
graphic meaning,
the documentary archive as in the photojournalistic picture file. The social saturation
John Tagg is Professor and Chair of Art History at Binghamton
University,
books include The Burden of Representation,
The Cultural Politics
Grounds of Dispute.
York. His
State University
of New
and
of "Postmodernism"
Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 2003)

2003 by The Ohio State University
NARRATIVE,
Copyright
John Tagg
of the New Deal and the market saturation of the New Media: what space for re
sponse did they allow, other than immersion, subjection, and seduction? What re
course remained to the subject in the face of their new calls to emergence? What
prospects might there be for resisting or evading their new machineries and their de
mands for the efficient delivery and receipt of meaning? This is the problem of
Walker Evans with his camera in the mid-1930s?the
problem of the character of his
stubborn refusals, his famous "lassitude," his inertia, his "negative personal magnet
"
ism and what Lincoln Kirstein irritably called "the skimmed decadence of so much
of his work" (qtd. inMellow
142).'
Before we can approach this, however, we must understand something of the
economy of meaning inwhich Evans had to find a way to use his camera. Where to
begin with this? At the barber's shop, perhaps, with Roland Barthes. But, there, we
may
find
out
ourselves
of
luck,
at
least
as regards
our
choice
of magazine.2
Laying hands on a copy of the 15 February 1937 issue o? Life, with its frame
filling face of Japanese Premier General Senjuro Hayashi, was surprisingly difficult
in the winter of 1937 (Fig. 1). Surprising, because more than 650,000 copies had
been
produced.
But
this was
Fig.
nowhere
1.Cover,
near
enough
to meet
Life, vol. 2, no. 7 (February
demand.
15, 1937).
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
When Life had been in the planning stage inAugust 1936, a modest circulation
of two hundred thousand had been projected for the new picture magazine
(Wain
wright 32).3 By the time of its first issue on 23 November, however, it already had
235,000 charter subscriptions and the print order had been raised to 466,000, with
more than two hundred thousand copies earmarked for newsstands (63, 74).4 At ten
cents a time, these sold out on the first day and dealers pleaded to increase their or
ders by as much as five times. For the more than three hundred advertisers who had
committed to Life before the date of the first issue, this was a windfall. It delivered
them an expanding national audience, while their contracts guaranteed them fixed
space rates for a year at $1,500 per page, $800 per half page, or $2,500 for a page of
inside color. When Life's circulation jumped far beyond its quarter million guarantee
and kept on climbing, its budget projections were exposed as a disastrous miscalcu
lation. With its low cover price, the magazine, which by design depended on adver
tising fees for running costs and any profit, lost more than five million dollars in its
first year (seeWainwright 41-42, 81).
The loss did not slow momentum. An extraordinary market had opened in the
pages of the magazine. With each issue, production numbers were increased, break
ing 650,000 in January 1937 and one million before April. Itwas still not sufficient.
Circulation research on a targeted town inMassachusetts
suggested that, nationally,
five or six million copies might have been sold (81-82). This was, however, far be
in Chicago, on
yond the capacity of the improvised rotary presses at Donnelley's
which the technologically
innovative magazine was being printed. Presses ran day
and night in these early months, only clearing one issue in order to begin printing the
next. Still the complaints poured in, inflamed by the widely held suspicion that the
to force readers to subscribe and to compel dealers
shortage was being manipulated
to
take more
copies
of Life's
sister
Time.
magazine,
Life's
circulation
manager
re
1936 that, "The de

sponded defensively,
telling Time Inc. employees in December
mand for Life is without precedent in publishing history. If we could supply the
copies, the dollar volume of our newsstand sales this month would be greater than the
dollar volume of sales of any other magazine in the world" (qtd. inWainwright 83).
So itwas that a copy of Life in the winter of 1937 remained a prized possession,
the object of competition at barbers' shops and cocktail parties, as well as at news
stands. Frustrated vendors
windows,
in order
to preserve
resorted to displaying
the goodwill
of
their
dismembered
customers.5
copies
in their shop
In such ways,
the ac
tual readership of Life far exceeded the plain circulation figures. In fact, by April
1938, when circulation had reached two million, George Gallup's American Institute
of Public Opinion estimated that upwards of seventeen million
adults saw that
month's first issue, suggesting a "pass along readership" of more than eight adults
per copy (Wainwright 98).6 Itwould have been hard indeed to dispute the boasting of
proprietor Henry Luce when inApril 1937, barely five months after the first issue, he
told ameeting of theAmerican Association
of Advertising Agencies: "Evidently, it is
what the public wants more than it has ever wanted any product of ink and paper"
(qtd. inWainwright 94).
Nothing but ink and paper Life may have been, but the level of demand it ex
cited was extraordinary, even granting that it had been painstakingly designed and
John Tagg
promoted to have this effect. What was it that drove this demand, or shall we say
desire? Novelty, of course, and the established promotional machine of Time In
corporated. But also the seduction of production values: abundant photographs; satis
fying paper quality; big format; engagingly varied typography; a dramatic yet open,
layout and design; all made possible by a technological leap involv
modern-feeling
ing the production of coated paper in rolls for printing at speed on rotary presses that
"flash dried" the printed ink. Then there was a new content package, planned like the
evening's
celebrity
of
viewing
later
network
television
modest
entertainment,
biographies,
age:
news,
titillation,
features,
sports,
gossip,
parts,"
spectacle?"equal
as
Bernard De Voto suggested in the 29 January 1938 Saturday Review of Literature, "of
the decapitated Chinaman, the flogged Negro, the surgically explored peritoneum,
and the rapidly slipping chemise" (qtd. in Swanberg 145). The tone was equally vari
able,
at turns
urgent,
solemn,
crass,
comic,
or cute.
From
the beginning,
going
beyond
Time's middle-brow digest and even beyond the dramatizations of The March of Time
newsreel, Life was planned to take a broad perspective in tackling its subjects, to be,
in Henry Luce's words, "simple and naive," "partly for people who find it too hard
12).7
going to read Time every week cover to cover" (qtd. inWainwright
As a calculated step down from Time, Luce's particular ambition for Life was
for look-through purposes" or, on second
that it should be "the best magazine
look
best non-pornographic
"the damnedest
thoughts, remembering Esquire,
in
What
bound
the
in
the
States"
United
29).8
(qtd. Wainwright
through magazine
was
a
new
As
Daniel
first
of
address.
mode
well,
mix, therefore,
Life's
Long
picture
editor and office manager, argued early on, "the quick nervousness of pictures is a
new language" (qtd. inWainwright
21).9 His views were echoed by Luce's team,
who saw "pictorial journalism" as "a new language, difficult, as yet unmastered, but
incredibly powerful
ness
would
strangeness
and strangely universal"
for profit,
that power
be
the claim
forgotten.
Yet,
(Four Hours
n.p.).10 In the drive to har
to universality
would
become
Longwell's
earlier
assessment
commonplace;
was
nearer
the
the
mark. The "pictorial journalism" of Life was an enervating language that excited an
irresistible drive to look, to possess in the stains of ink on paper all that belonged to
the
Imaginary,
all
that was
given
to sight
and,
now,
had
to be
seen.
This was the core of Henry Luce's idea. As he famously remarked: "Today I
may not be in amood nor feel the need to read the finest article about the Prime Min
ister. But Iwill stop to watch him take off his shoe" (qtd. inWainwright 7). Or, as his
editorial team put it: "Fortunately perhaps for the race, all standards of news-value
yield before the imperious desire to see, and see again, the female form divine"
shoe, the "female form
25).n The Prime Minister's
(Four Hours qtd. inWainwright
divine": the object changes, but the "imperious," overriding compulsion to see, this
is the primary process in the
scopic drive attributed to all, without difference,
"The
with
the
identification
reader's
appeal of pictures is univer
picture magazine.
an
in
the
December
for
advertisement
1936 issue of Fortune mag
sal," declared
Life
answer
which
is born in a living animal,
the Great Inquisitiveness
azine: "Pictures
our object. The only com
for
We
and
look
look, searching
part of its lust for life."12
face:
"Farmer faces, mining
the
petitor to "the female form divine" is, tellingly,
faces, faces of rugged individualists, Harlem faces, hopeful faces, tired old faces,
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
smart night club faces?faces

from Tennessee and Texas, faces from New England
and the Pacific Coast?the
faces of the U.S." (Four Hours qtd. inWainwright
26).
From the beginning of Life, these faces stare out, page after page. The reader
searches them for recognition, hanging on their gaze, wanting, as Life photographer
Margaret Bourke-White would say: "Not just the unusual or striking face, but the
face that would speak out the message from the printed page" (Portrait 137).13 An
object for a subject and a subject for an object, joined by "the message": Life is a
mirror
a window,
and
screen
a frame.
and
In
its pages,
cannot
readers
but
find
themselves
looking and looking.

This is what the first prospectus for a picture magazine then called Dime says in
"The basic premise" of publication "is that people like to look. . . .They
mid-1936:
like to look at everything including themselves in the mirror. They also like to look
at pictures, and especially in these swift-changing days they like to look at pictures
which show them what is going on inAmerica and in the world" (qtd. inWainwright
30). This
is how Life would finally declare
To see life; to see the world;

and
poor
the
gestures
to eyewitness
the
of
itself:
to
proud;
great events; to watch

see
strange
the faces of the

armies,
things?machines,
shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man's work?his

towers
and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things
paintings,
hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women
that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see
multitudes,
and
be
amazed;
to see
and
be
instructed.
Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will
and new expectancy
of half
mankind.
The
can
To see, and to show, is the mission

lication, (qtd. inWainwright
33)14
now undertaken by a new kind of pub
lure is the incitement of the drive?the
drive driven desperate. Everything
seen
be
is put
unimportant,
though
before
it goes
"half
us,
on
mankind."
as before.
cannot
What
Government,
be
shown
bureaucracy,
that
seen
and
is
sur
policing,
the circuits of capital, the violence of exchange?all

this
veillance,
intelligence,
means nothing, except insofar as it is accumulated and commodified as spectacle: the
scopic harnessed to consummativity, calling into place a new field of subjects, over
coding the program of social life.15 Such patterns of investment may be overly famil
iar now, but the lust for Life marked one of those quantum leaps. It registered the
of
emergence
a
change
a new
in the
very
polity,
unseen
a new
economy,
structures
of
a new
pattern
identification
of
and
imaginary
consent,
recruitment,
in short,
tooling of the social imaginary that enabled the cycles of the social economy
a new
a re
to enter
phase.
A new economy? Hard, perhaps, to see this in the pages of a ten cent magazine.
Yet, these pages are screens and their images points of condensation and capture in
which a certain compelling force makes its subject arrive. For Luce's enterprise, Life
called into existence a new national market. For advertisers, it delivered a national
consumership.
For readers, Life was a conduit
to an imaginary integration, national
John Tagg
in horizon, yet founded on fantasized interactions and relations whose locus was the
individual, for whom this fantasized field increasingly served as compensation for a
displaced, divided, and hollowed out social life. But I am getting, perhaps, too far
from
theme.
my
15 February 1937. Volume 2, number 7, page nine (Fig. 2). The header tells us
this is "LIFE." Immediately below, spread almost across the entire page like a banner
STANDARD OF LIVING," edged in patriotic
headline, "WORLD'S HIGHEST
stripes running nearly parallel to the top of the page and decorated at themargins with
white stars. A thin black wedge to the upper right iswarning this is no headline. Below
it, what looks like a cable connection crosses "LIVING" and obliterates a star. Then
comes the giant, foreshortened family?if
such it is?faces pressed against the wind
shield of a car, the driver's knuckles bulging through the glass, only the family dog es
caping the crush through the open side window. The dog is also the only one without
perfect teeth, at least as far as we can see; but its eyes are as button bright as all the oth
ers and set on the road ahead. "There's no way like theAmerican Way" floats in cursive
over the hood of the car, before a suggested landscape, like the vision of St. Paul.
The atmosphere is certainly that of a kind of ecstasy (Fig. 3). The overwhelm
ing general impression is of a spotless health and happiness in which everything is
new, everything is moving forwards?moving
obliquely towards the right, which is
where the huge yet toylike car will come into collision first with some sort of barrier,
then with a rather less fortunate, strung-out group who are all black (unlike the shiny
occupants of the looming car) and who, though far from shabby, do not seem so
newly pressed. Radiant sunshine falls on the figures in the car, but those in the line
no
cast
shadows.
are
They
caught
in a general
Only
gloom.
one
of
them,
a man
in a
leather helmet, looks back and sees what is coming their way. Another man, further
up the line, glances behind, to our left, beyond the frame. Five others look right at us,
or
to where
the
camera
once
was.
The
stare
remainder
blankly
ahead,
over
to
the
right, but apparently not at the future towards which the car rushes on. There is also
a ghost, behind the line and directly in the path of the automobile grill, though not
quite in either space. Below comes the sidewalk, littered and stained, though it is
hard to be certain about this. Beneath the sidewalk, the white page and the black
headline: "THE FLOOD LEAVES ITS VICTIMS ON THE BREAD LINE."
For
those
who
have
seen
the
two
issues
preceding
of
the magazine,
the
story
has
been well prepared, with extensive agency photographs, maps, and pages of expla
nation: "Floods Drive 288,000 People From Their Homes," declared Life on 1 Feb
"America's Worst Flood Makes Nearly A Million
it
ruary (16-17);
Refugees,"
announced on 8 February (9-23).16 "Louisville got the worst of it," its report went
on, "with three quarters of the city under water" (12). The inundation had caused
more damage inmonetary terms than any previous flood in the nation's history. In its
wake had come disease, fire, looting, martial law, and an overwhelming
refugee
rivers, filling ar
problem: almost amillion homeless along the Ohio and Mississippi
mories,
drama
off
cities
tent
barracks,
of
this
seen
even coming
box
cities,
cars,
catastrophe?ruptured
from
the
late, when
air,
evacuations,
stations,
levees,
flooded
refugees?is
and
warehouses.
fields,
roof
in these
the story if not the flood was receding,
The
real
tops,
wreckage,
earlier
editions.
visual
cut
Yet,
the lead page of the
UFE
OF LTVWC
WORLD'SHICHEST
STANDARD
Fig. 2. "The Rood Leaves ItsVictims On The Bread Line," Life, vol.
2, no. 7 (15 February
1937), page 9.
OF LIViMC
WORLD'S HICHESTSTANDARD
Fig. 3. "The Hood Leaves ItsVictims On The Bread Line," Life, vol. 2, no.
7 (15 February
1937), page 9. Photograph
by Margaret Bourke-White,
Louisville,
Kentucky, February 1937.
10
JohnTagg
15 February issue presented readers with a striking graphic layout and image?
strong enough, indeed, to survive the visual chaos and contradictory message of
the facing page: a photo-strip advertisement for Heinz Aristocrat tomato products
from "the Good Green Earth" of Bowling Green, Ohio (Fig. 4). Anchored by the
headline and the brief captioning text, the message on the editorial page is tren
chant and abrupt. The "Great Flood" had passed on down the Ohio Valley into the
Mississippi,
leaving debris, "ghastly mess," and four hundred dead: "It was going
to take a lot of money to restore the American
standard of living in the cities and
towns of the Ohio Valley" (9).17
The 15 February issue of Life has an undeniably forceful and sardonic open
ing?if an opening it is, after six and one-half pages of advertising for cars, cruises,
fruit juice, and leather goods, and a two and one-half page feature, "Speaking of
Pictures," on the antics of nature photographer William Lovell Finley. Margaret
Bourke-White's photograph on page nine turns, of course, on the ironies of such jux
itself, however, they are to be passed over smoothly,
tapositions. In the magazine
without notice and without interruption. The convention of the separation
is strictly maintained, even though the picture magazine format grew out
least for Heinz,
advertising and even though advertising designers?not
cars, and Goodrich Silvertown Tires, in this very same issue?had already
of powers
of graphic
Plymouth
responded
I TK65?061EEMAR?H
I
Fig. 4. 'The Good Green Earth," Advertisement

1937), page 8.
Life, vol. 2, no. 7 (15 February
for Heinz
Products,
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
11
to the pages of Life by seeking to absorb their novel rhetoric and narrative style.18
Such mutuality makes clear-cut distinctions between editorial and advertising poten
tially tricky, on both sides. But that is not the convention.
Officially, then, the photograph inwhich I am interested, by a commercial pho
tographer who saw the light, may fall on page nine but itmarks the proper beginning
of the issue. There is plenty more to come: not the aerial photographs of drowned
farmlands, broken levees, submerged rail yards, and marooned towns that had filled
seventeen pages in the issue of the week before; but rather, how the staff of the
and the Louisville Times got out a joint edition by lamp
Louisville Courier-Journal
light; how God has provided a relief station at St. Paul's Episcopal Church; how the
"swank" clubhouse at Churchill Downs has become temporary home to African
American flood refugees; how five hundred other "Negroes," prisoners from Shelby
have gone to work in chain gangs to repair the
County Penal Farm near Memphis,
levees. And, beyond this, turning the page, how a tiger turned on its trainer; how
his third-grade
Charlie Johns has married Eunice Winstead,
twenty-two-year-old
vandalized
the
"Women's
how
the
Tennessee
Brigade"
Emergency
neighbor;
Chevrolet plant in Flint, Michigan; how this caused the upper stratum of Chrysler
to miss the "South Seas" party at the Book-Cadillac Hotel in Detroit;
management
how
how the President, Andrew Mellon, and Jean Harlow have fared inWashington;
a wife should undress for her husband; how Spanish fascist bombers took out a mu
nitions train from the air. Then, too, there is the Oxford Group at Malvern, Cuban
the Japanese Emperor's palace, the Duke of Norfolk's wedding?
cockfighting,
more.
The heterogeneity and indeed the bathos of these successive topics and
plenty
genres might prove disorienting, even driven along by "the imperious desire to see."
But there remains at least the remnant of a conventional journalistic architecture
here. Page nine is the "Big News-Picture
Story of theWeek," as Henry Luce defined
to
anatomize Life.19 "The Lead," Luce wrote, thinking
it in his repeated attempts
on
the first twelve issues of Life, "is what the Prospectus calls The Big News
back
Picture Story of theWeek.' The Inauguration, the Sit-down Strike, the Sand-hog
Murder, and above all the Flood proved that there is such a thing" (Wainwright 89).
The Big News-Picture
Story. The photograph fills almost three-fifths of the
page. With only slight cropping on either side, it is, in turn, filled to its own frame?
in its upper three-fifths by the poster image and in its lower two-fifths by the figures
standing in line. All points of reference external to the confrontation of these two
worlds are excluded. The poster is not shown as a billboard or located in a landscape.
The queue has no discernible end in view and, in fact, no end in the picture at all. On
the left, it runs into the gutter. On the right, it bleeds from the page. Without referring
to the headline below, the line seems pointless and, in this, quite at odds with the ec
static determination of the family above, which moves on joyously to an end we also
cannot see, across the line of standing figures, along the "American Way" whose
name fills a space on the right but, in illusion, hovers before the hood of the car,
above its winged figure, beckoning onward. This way is "American"?that
great
amorphous, irresolvable signifier of a settler community, floating untroubled, here,
by the violence of its forgetting. The car rushes along it?along a way not taken by
those who shuffle across its path, who
seem?all
but one?to
have turned their backs
12
John Tagg
on it and now, effectively, to stand in the way, soon, perhaps, to be knocked down
like skittles, swept aside by sheer speed, washed away by the river of progress of
which they have fallen foul.
The photographer, Margaret Bourke-White,
has chosen her perspective care
fully to give us precisely this. Typically, she spared herself no risk and others no in
to get the shot she wanted. She had made her name "riding jackknife
convenience
bridges, crawling over skyscrapers and pushing her lenses into white hot steel mills
for just the right shots" (qtd. in Goldberg 99).20 To photograph the Supreme Court,
also for the 15 February issue of Life, she set up her camera tripod in the perfect spot,
which happened to be the middle of street. With her remarkable concentration and
oblivious disregard of other people, she gave no thought to fouling up traffic for
the viewpoint and the choice of lens were, with the ma
blocks.21 For Bourke-White,
of lighting, fundamental to the didactic structure of the image, to the mes
the physical positioning
of the camera certainly also signaled the
sage?though
heroics of what Luce liked to call the "crack photographer," the shaping of whose
nipulation
a second,
for Bourke-White,
was,
persona
work
parallel
hardly
from
separable
the
photographic work itself.

If the construction of this persona was a way inwhich Bourke-White negotiated
the anxieties of insertion into a particular field of subjectivities, then it also had com
mercial value, as she realized early on, and it equally suited the economy of the new
the antics of the "crack photographer" were
magazine. From the very beginning,
central to the glamour and modernity of Life.22 The photographers were the stars.
The writers carried their bags and heavy equipment and, in Bourke-White's
case, re
was
did
Bourke-White
her
195, 343).
laundry (see Goldberg
putedly
always the ex
ception among exceptions. At Life, she had her own staff and an enclosed office,
go with her $12,000 a year starting salary. Itwas a price the magazine was willing
pay,
and
not
just
as a cost
of
the travel, and the life were

Bourke-White
makes
image, and inwhich

pains
to meet
The
drama
business,
doing
since
integral to the package
a picture"
was
always
part
of
the
of her
classic
the pose,
the
being sold, in which

the performative
an essential part of the story would
the challenge
here was
salary,
to
to
clothes,
"Margaret
of
meaning
the
always be an account of her
assignment.23
fare.
Bourke-White's
biographer
tells
us
that Man
aging Editor John Shaw Billings gave her one hour's notice to leave on assignment
(Goldberg 186). Bourke-White herself was happy to embellish the tale: "I caught the
then hitchhiked my way from the mud-swamped
last plane to Louisville,
airport to
the town. To accomplish the last stretch of this journey, I thumbed rides in rowboats
and once on a large raft. These makeshift craft were bringing food packages and bot
tles of clean drinking water to marooned families and seeking out survivors. Work
ing from the rowboats gave me good opportunities to record acts of mercy as they
occurred" (Portrait 149). Stories like this accumulated. They were part of an ex
pected performance, and issue by issue, over the weeks, the photographs plotted its
acts. This was part of their aura, though that is not at all to say that the
It is rather to say that, at a level of contrived con
photographs are autobiographical.
Bourke-White's
notation,
photographs arrived like postcards home from the air
career
woman U.S. Camera called in May
of
the
1940 "the most
plane-hopping
succeeding
The Melancholy
famous
reporter
on-the-spot
the world
over";
Realism
famous
of Walker Evans
enough
for
her
13
name
to be
public byword; famous enough in the late 1930s for her own face to have become fa
advertisements
for air travel, California wine, telephones, and
miliar in magazine
Camel cigarettes; famous enough by the 1940s to qualify for the title, "Topflight Fa
mous American Woman" (qtd. in Goldberg 194).24
Yet, in the magazine spread, the photograph is anonymous. The photographer's
name does not appear until the contents page, all but lost in a column of narrow type
with
page
numbers
and
this
names?in
issue
on
page
sixty-four,
as
at
always,
the
back. The camera's viewpoint is, therefore, only belatedly personified. On the lead
page, its first function is as the architecture of a statement: an editorial message that
and anonymous as the
may be signed, but that is still as efficient, professional,
house-style prose of the text below. The viewpoint invests the grammar of the mes
sage, and its effects are dispersed across the image, in which the orchestration of
space, laterally and in depth, produces a frieze-like layering of shallow planes that
work against any privileging of the center. The viewpoint is purely amatter of struc
ture:
the
trace
of
a maneuver
to engender
necessary
particular
coding
effect.
And
this is part of the image's oddly detached effect. The viewpoint is not a subjective,
located space. Nor is it the point of insertion of the viewer into a rhetorical immedi
acy: the point of capture by the rhetoric of recruitment that characterized the new
language
of
"documentary."
This
is not
"documentary"
image.
It does
not
demand
the enactment of the viewpoint as a psychic space, a point of identification at which

the viewer is interpellated into the dramaturgy of the image and compelled to "the
plane of decent seeing" (Grierson 38). Nor is this an eyewitness account. It is not
written in the first person, though that does not preclude a tone of "commitment."
What is distinctive about Bourke-White's
photograph is not that it inscribes an
act of seeing, but that it constructs a legible message: a pictorial summation from
which the arbitrariness of chance and the excess of particularity that afflict photogra
phy are strangely drained. The viewpoint is a function of composition, and the com
position is painstaking and precise. The unusual choice of camera is crucial here.
While the still relatively new small-format, 35 mm cameras predominated
in Life's
in
and
the
while,
newspaper world, photographers
original photography department,
almost invariably carried heavy four-by-five Speed Graphics, with fixed flash attach
ments, Bourke-White preferred the image quality of her four-by-five wooden Soho
reflex camera and her 3V4 x 4V4 Linhof, with multiple,
synchronized flash exten
sions. Bourke-White's
method
of working, with big camera, battery of lights, and

but
long poses, precluded intimacy
placed the whole mise en sc?ne under her firm di
rectorial control. Erskine Caldwell said of working with her in 1936, the year before,
that "She was in charge of everything, manipulating people and telling them where
to sit and where to look and what not. She was very adept at being able to direct peo
ple. She was almost like amotion picture director" (Caldwell interview, 1December
seen through the screen of her Linhof
1982; qtd. in Goldberg
168). In Louisville,
from
the
dour
the
rain-filled
camera,
light
sky flattened Bourke-White's
subject in a
use
a
that
worked
with
her
of
focal
way
long
length lens, telescoping optical space,
pushing the line back against the billboard, and heightening both their proximity and
their contrast.25 More often, however, Bourke-White was unprepared to work with
14
John Tagg
available
illumination. She sought greater plasticity and contrast, thinking of pho

tography as sculpting with light, using multiple artificial light sources set out in se
ries, at a variety of angles, and synchronized with a remote shutter release.26 This
those taken in Buchenwald on the day of liberation of
gave her photographs?even
the death camp?a melodramatic
theatricality and a strange sheen, not unlike the
high polish on the family in the car speeding along the American Way. The techni
cal aspects of photography were not, however, what dominated Bourke-White's
choices. Having set up her camera precisely, her method was to take the same pic
ture,
or
minutely
variant,
adjusted
over
and
over,
so
that
she
could
sure
be
of
correct exposure. As she told Ansel Adams: "I just set the shutter at l/200th of a
second, take a picture with every stop I have. I'm bound to get something" (qtd. in
Goldberg 206).27
in this way, the photograph as printed, almost full frame, has, for all
Composed
its sorry subject, the polished inevitability and urbane wit o? Life's smooth corporate
writing.28 Its meaning is explicit. With controlled and self-confident panache, it says
what it has to say, undistracted by the irreducible richness of its anecdotal content:
the way different men and women wear their hats; the ways they stand and what they
do with their hands; their individual choices of shoes; the decision whether to turn up
a coat collar or not; the preference for basket, galvanized bucket, or paper bag?not
likely, one would think, to prove equally serviceable to every end. It is not that such
incidentals are negligible to the image, to the extent that they give the "bread line" a
lived particularity excluded from the untarnished ego ideals above. What matters,
however, is the contrast, the overarching polarity that every local detail has to serve,
as concrete particulars have to express the underlying movement of the Hegelian di
alectic.
Economy,
force,
and
aptness
of
works by binary opposition, its empirical

this simple internal principle.
This
is not,
after
all,
are. It does not tell us why

glazed,
bemused,
or
an
informative
are
argument
the prime
rule.
richness only the cumulative

image.
not
It does
give
us cues
The
argument
elaboration
to where
of
we
the line has formed. It does not show us the causes of the
resigned
expressions.
It does
not
allow
us
to
see
why
only
African Americans queue here; why or whether they are the sole "victims"; where
the white folks form their line; or whether we would be right to surmise that white
folks all ride in cars. The photograph does not answer questions such as these. It is
not that kind of journalism. Nor does it do what Edwin Locke andWalker Evans, on
a short leash from their government boss Roy Stryker, were dispatched to do at ex
actly this time, accumulating entries for the photographic file, some way downriver
in Forrest City, Arkansas, on the flood plain south of the confluence of the Missis
the meaning of the flood was clear: itwas
sippi and Ohio Rivers. For Bourke-White,
"another bitter chapter in the bleak drama of waste of our American earth" (Portrait
150). When it came tomaking a photograph, Bourke-White had the same summariz
Story of theWeek was not an accumulative
ing intentions. Life's Big News-Picture
record that risked the awkward, the fugitive, and the fragmentary. Itwas a condensed
skill inwriting headlines that shaped the
visual headline. And itwas Bourke-White's
internal economy
FLOOD LEAVES
in this image, anchored by the headline:

of meaning
ITS VICTIMS ON THE BREAD LINE."29
"THE
The Melancholy
"The American Way"

Of
and
and
Living"
below.
"The
Movement
Bread
Realism
of Walker Evans
and the path of "The Flood." "World's Highest

Line."
towards
and
Consumers
us
and movement
"Victims."
Living
to the margin.
and
Speed
15
Standard
lost. Above
and
stagna
tion. Ecstasy and apathy. White and black. American and something else. One an
tithesis overlays another. The accumulation of connotations condenses in a single
trope. This is the rhetorical gambit of the image. This is the nexus of irony that, for
Bourke-White,
spoke what she saw. Photographers believe they find their tropes in
it was
the world. That is what makes them insist they are real. For Bourke-White
straightforward: "There was the irony of the relief line standing against the incon
gruous background of an NAM poster showing a contented family complete with
no way
cherubic children, dog and car, its printed message proclaiming, There's
"
like the American Way'
(Portrait 150).
Irony.What Bourke-White did with the large-format camera was driven by her
determination to fix this rhetorical structure, which she took herself merely to have
discovered, yet whose organization into an effective picture involved a process she
thought of as symbolization.30 Where Bourke-White positioned herself put distance
and externality over proximity and intimacy; while the long focal length of her lens
flattened the queuing figures and collapsed the uncertain space between the billboard
and the line, just as the unknown billboard designer had compressed the foreshort
ened space in the fictive car. It is as if the line of figures has been pasted on the bot
tom of the billboard,
the whole being flattened
like a poster, exposing?yet
repeating?the
spatial deception in the poster itself. This is, however, where the
rhetoric of irony begins to turn and the tropic structure of the image to efface itself.
The symbolic momentum gathered by the car is thrown into reverse. It is the line that
now stands out as the rhetorical platform of the picture, a truth that cannot be ig
nored, the embodiment of a passive need that calls forth government action. Those
who seemed to be the fall guys of a cruel joke made behind their backs now rise up
as a concrete reality against which the joke falls flat. They are the Real thatmeasures
representation, the Real thatmarks its final frame.
The rhetoric of the image cashes out in a decisive way. The wrinkled, puckered
surface
of
the poster
shows
itself,
paper
thin,
easily,
we
now
see,
peeled
away.
The
world of the billboard is the world of illusion, held up by its superstructure over the
social reality at its base. To use again a favorite term of Birmingham cultural studies
in the 1970s, the meaning of the fictive scene is "cashed out" in the real social rela
tions beneath it. The poster is nothing but a representation, demonstrably inadequate
to the reality of the "Bread Line." This is the bad faith of representation: representa
tion is tendentious, motivated,
trompe F oeil. Reality, outside all interest, present to
is
without
itself,
given, unmediated,
re-presentation, to the unfooled eye. We see the
truth now. The careful rhetorical construction of the image has brought us to this
point. Representation, which seemed to be put at issue in the photograph, is only
being cited, only being quoted in the image; but what falls outside all quotation
marks is the Real itself.31 It is this to which the photograph claims to give us access.
And this is its authorization. The image makes a play with representation only to re
lease itself from representation's
limits, placing itself outside citation on a ground
beyond dispute.
16
John Tagg
is a striking economy here. The message of the photograph is succinct,

succinct enough to be read at a glance, undelayed by ambiguities or uncertainties.
But the message of the photograph, unlike the message of the billboard, is the mes
sage of the Real itself, given to us to see, even before our eyes drop to the bottom of
There
the page and we read: "The one flood problem which did not abate was that of relief.
The water had cut off not only shelter but food and income. Lines formed outside
each overworked relief agency. People came with baskets, bags, pails, or merely
empty hands and hungry stomachs. Some of them, residents of the completely inun
dated Negro quarter of Louisville, appear in the picture above. They are inching past
a sign erected before the flood as part of a propaganda campaign of the National As
sociation of Manufacturers"
(Life, 15 February 1937: 9). Everything is accounted for
in this economy. Meaning
always balances out on the bottom line. The argument
may be rhetorical but the argument ends with the Real, and you can't argue with that.
It is beyond dispute. As in the inveterate structure of ideology critique, the photo
graph finally exempts itself of the charge it levels against representation. Represen
tation is "propaganda," betraying interests. The denotative force of the photograph
puts before us the reality in which these interests are formed and the reality against
which representation can be judged. The photograph is therefore put beyond adjudi
cation.
No
need
for
representation
when
it already
assumes
the
force
of
law.
One has to say it is impressively done. On 16 February 1937, only a day after
for permission
the image was published, Beaumont Newhall wrote to Bourke-White
to include it in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition, Photography
1839-1937
Box
Bourke-White's
of
the
Louisville
(Bourke-White Papers,
#31).32
photograph
leaks. There is no remainder. Al
flood is, indeed, exemplary, watertight. Nothing
ways granting, of course, that we do not get distracted by the cable wire that marks
the corner like a dog-eared fold. The cable pulls at the inevitable force of the frame,
marking the arbitrariness of the cut of the camera's field of view and the cut of the
cropping knife. The wire is like a hair on the negative: by rights, it should not be
there, but it cannot be blown away. Then there is the line of figures: the idiosyncrasy
of their clothes, their gestures, their facial expressions, their choices of footwear, the
things they carry and have seen fit to bring with them on the line. None of this quite
plays its allotted role. It is not wholly subsumable within the rhetorical function the
line must perform: the mirror other to the world of the billboard Imaginary. It is not
wholly absorbable into the structure of binary difference. Even ignoring the ghost,
with its spectral witness to the mark of time on the materiality of the photograph,
there is too much left over that does not disappear.
In the background, too, the billboard itself has a thickness at odds with its trans
parent function. Reduced to the role of fall guy, of comic stooge, the poster looming
over the figures in the foreground has taken on for later audiences the status of a
in effect. It stands for the
generic kitsch object, laughable in intent and weakened
and
the
naively patriotic public culture of a superseded
cynical corporate jingoism
of
Ozzie and Harriet. In 1937, however, itmeant both more and
time, gone the way
less
than
this?something
charged
with
specific
resonance,
topical
controversy,
and
an identifiable stamp. Life's editorial writers were themselves quick enough to name
it and separate themselves from its taint: it is "a sign erected before the flood as part
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
17
of a propaganda campaign of the National Association

of Manufacturers." Yet this
more
can
are not told what the Na
launches
boats
than
it
afloat.
We
caption
keep
tional Association of Manufacturers
is or why itwould engage in a propaganda cam
paign at this time. Propaganda for what? Directed at whom? How much did Life's
writers feel they could assume? How much were readers already cued to supply?
The poster has, in fact, no signature, other than that of the graphic artist, which
Bourke-White's
photograph does not show. Yet, as they appeared on the streets of
American towns and cities inDecember
1936 and in the early months of 1937, bill
boards such as the one in Louisville
(Fig. 5) were recognizable enough.33 They
not
the
of
Bourke-White, but also of government photographers Ed
eye
caught
only
Arthur
Locke,
Rothenstein, and Dorothea Lange, who logged them for the Resettle
ment Administration
file inMemphis, Tennessee; Kingwood, West Virginia; Birm
and
99 in California.34 The billboard
ingham, Alabama;
along U.S. Highway
three
months
and
three different designs posted at
campaign, lasting
encompassing
sixty
thousand
sites
across
the
country,
was
something
new,
something
to remark,
even in the turbulent and inventive political landscape of the second Roosevelt ad
ministration.35 Its sloganizing fed into the rising drone of political noise that marked
this moment of conflict, the turning point for New Deal reformism, in which new
media and new techniques of public communications
began to rework the political
At
the
level
of
the
if not the smooth delivery,
content, however,
process.
message,
was familiar?as was the voice, whether identified on the billboards or not. Contro
of Manufacturers
al
versy over the political activities of the National Association
Fig.
5. Edwin
"Road Sign Near

Library of Congress).
Locke,
tographs Division,
Kingwood,
West
Virginia,
February
1937"
(Prints and Pho
18
John Tagg
ready had a history, but it was coming to a head again at this time in 1937, when,
under force of subpoena, full-time officials and elected officers of the association
were called to hearings in Congress, before a Senate subcommittee investigating vi
olations of the right to free speech and assembly and interference with the right of
labor to organize and bargain collectively.36
The National Association
"a mutual and cooperative organi
of Manufacturers,
zation of American manufacturers
in the United States," had been formed at a gath
on 22 January 1895, at a time when the
in Cincinnati
ering of industrialists
and
organizational
successes
legislative
of
craft
unions
were
pushing
manufacturers
to go beyond existing trade organizations,

to organize themselves across industries
and on a national scale.37What spurred action in 1895 was the backlash from the
wave of violently suppressed "anarchistic strikes" that accompanied the severe eco
nomic slump of 1894. In the struggle to shape public opinion, the National Associa
tion of Manufacturers
emerged as what one historian has called "a permanent
for
propaganda association," advocating for the interests of industrialists, mobilizing
control of the legislative agenda, and vehemently
the
rise
of
unionism
attacking
con
the National Association
of Manufacturers
(Bonnett 396). In its publications,
demned the American Federation of Labor as "un-American,
and
indecent"
illegal
(qtd. in Senate Committee Part 17, Exhibit 3803, p. 7547).38 Its president, John
Kirby, Jr., railed that "The American Federation of Labor is engaged in an open war
fare against Jesus Christ and his cause" (Exhibit 3804, p. 7547).39 So determined in
the early 1900s was the association's opposition to legislation favored by the Ameri
can Federation of Labor that its political and legislative maneuvering
came under in
was
not
to
committees
of
the
It
be
the last time.
vestigation by
sixty-third Congress.
of Manufactur
By the mid- 1930s, the prime targets of the National Association
ers had changed: now, the object of its wrath was no longer theAmerican Federation
of Labor, but rather the regulatory agencies of the New Deal, on the one side, and, on
the other, John Lewis's Committee for Industrial Organization,
armed with its new
weapon
of
the "sit-down
strike."
Nineteen
thirty-seven
was
the year
in which
conflict
all three parties erupted into the news.40 The National Association
of Manu
facturers then had forty-five hundred members,
representing companies employing
about one-third to one-half of all manufacturing workers in the United States.41 The
between
association
was,
however,
dominated
by
a core
of
around
two
hundred
large
firms
and corporations that contributed forty-nine percent of the organization's

total in
come and controlled its board of directors.42 The same companies bound the Na
such as the
tional Association
of Manufacturers
closely to affiliated organizations,
National Metal Trades Association,
that actively promoted company unions, anti
labor espionage, strike breaking, tear gas, and other "instrumentalities of industrial
warfare," as Senator Robert La Follette was to call them (Senate Committee Part 17,
into
of Manufacturers
Such policies brought the National Association
headlong conflict with the extension of union activity stimulated by the National In
dustrial Recovery Act of 1933 and given new protections by the National Labor Re
of Manufacturers
condemned
the
lations Act of 1935. The National Association
work of the National Labor Relations Board and was one of the "most active" ele
to discredit the National Labor Relations Act, arguing that it
ments in the movement
p. 7389).
The Melancholy
was
and
unconstitutional
to
hostile
of
the welfare
of Walker Evans
Realism
and,
industry
even
after
19
its pas
sage, inciting companies to defy it.43

Yet, in the words of one of its own earlier general managers, the National Asso
ciation of Manufacturers was "not primarily a labor-busting organization" (qtd. in
Senate Committee Part 17, Exhibit 3805, p. 7547).44 The definition of its general ob
jects and purposes given in its constitution had committed it, from the beginning, to
"the education of the public in the principles of individual liberty and ownership of
however, in the face
property" (qtd. in Exhibit 3788-A, p. 7486).45 By themid-1930s,
of government intervention and "the growing menace of industrial disputes," "the
of public
cultivation
had
understanding"
on
taken
a new
prominence,
even
as
the
tac
tics of "industrial warfare" showed signs of antagonizing public opinion (qtd. in Ex

hibit 3836, p. 7686).46 "Now, more than ever before," the association came to realize,
"strikes are being won or lost in the newspapers and over the radio" (Part 18, Exhibit
3866; also qtd. in Part 34, p. 13865).47 A 1933 policy review by the National Associ
ation
of Manufacturers'
Law
gave
Department
early
warning,
arguing
that:
The problem of public relations must have an active consideration that the As
sociation has never been able to give it. The public does not understand indus
try, largely because industry itself has made no real effort to tell its story; to
show the people of this country that our high living standards have arisen al
most altogether from the civilization which industrial activity has set up. On the
and the radi
other hand, selfish groups, including labor, the socialistic-minded
to
the people,
cal, have constantly and continuously misrepresented
industry
of our industrial economy,
with the result that there is a general misinformation
which
in its effect.
is highly destructive
(Part 17, Exhibit
3807, p. 7550)48
Writing with admirable candor in September 1937, the head of the National Associ
ation of Manufacturers'
"field force" put itmore succinctly: "The hazard facing in
dustrialists is the newly realized political power of the masses. Unless their thinking
is directed
sane
toward
and
established
measures,
we
are
definitely
headed
for
ad
versity" (Exhibit 3838, p. 7693).49

The
tion-wide
ing
the
answer,
modeled
educational
public?press,
on new
movement"
radio,
practices
that would
industrial
a "Na
was
of corporate
relations,
public
cover
known
channel
of
reach
"every
management,
stockholders,
employees,
in February 1934, a Na
industry, farmers, and other groups" (7693). Accordingly,
tional Industrial Information Committee was set up to raise special funds for "an ed
ucational program" prepared by a Public Relations Committee, under the guidance
of a Publicity Director.50 In December
1935, the affiliated National Industrial Com
of Manufacturers'
housed in the National Association
headquarters in New
was
to
the
Public
Information
also
York,
promote
Program
reorganized, primarily
more effectively. The National Industrial Committee itself went back to 1907, having
of
been organized as the means of extending the reach of the National Association
mittee,
to forty thousand additional companies. By 1935, the National Indus

to thirty-three
of Manufacturers
trial Committee
linked the National Association
state industrial associations,
industrial employment relations organiza
eighty-five
Manufacturers
20
John Tagg
trade associations.51 With this ex

tions, and seventy-eight national manufacturing
of Manu
tended network as its base, the annual income of the National Association
facturers' Public Information Program grew from nothing in 1933 to over one
hundred thousand dollars in 1935, to half a million dollars in 1936, to three-quarters
in 1937?fully
half the total income of the association as a whole,
of a million
was
for the actual publicity campaigns.52
seed
this
money
only
though
The 1937 report, Industry Must Speak!, published by the National Industrial In
formation Committee, outlined what "public information" and an expanded "educa
to daily newspapers,
tional program" entailed: press bulletins

news
columns,
stories,
outdoor
advertising,
and newsreels,
mailings,
news-clipping
radio
advertising,
language
foreign
(qtd. in Senate Committee
publications
to present
campaign
as
"industry
a courageous,
shorts
picture
letters,
Part 17, Exhibit
newspaper
direct
newsletters,
speeches,
circular
posters,
strips,
motion
dramas,
public
transcriptions,
syndicated newspaper
comic
and
radio
features,
bulletin-board
contacts,
employee
cartoons
services,
and
pamphlets,
The
3839, p. 7693-96).
was
force"
progressive
to embrace
(qtd. in Part 35, Exhibit 5485, p. 14384).53

"practically every known medium"
was
of Manufacturers'
National
Association
the
authorship of its
Rarely, however,
was
to work through
to
The
tactic
audiences.
materials
identified
target
publicity
local
"civic
and
businesses
who
organizations,"
would
local
sponsor
campaigns
using the association's materials. InApril 1937, for example, the National Associa
tion of Manufacturers
bought a series of thirteen "Harmony ads" designed by the ad
under the slogan "Prosperity Dwells Where
of
MacDonald-Cook,
vertising agency
then promoted these ready-made adver
The
National
Association
Harmony Reigns."
tisements to local business leaders as "the means of organizing a community against
labor agitators before they get in their work" (qtd. in Part 18, Exhibit 3852, p. 7895).54
When they appeared in local newspapers, however, as they did in 367 cities across
the country, their message carried only the endorsement of the civic organizations
and
"citizens'
committees"
to raise
tisements
local
costs
the publication
that underwrote
donations
of
in support
their
anti-labor
and
the adver
used
activities.55
vigilante
and other
The billboard campaign that appeared on the streets of Louisville
1936 and the early months of 1937 was, therefore, only
American cities inDecember
part of a broader, concerted program to shape public opinion and to mobilize "mer
chants,
professional
men,
farmers,
white-collar
and
workers,
other
are
which
groups
known as the Public" as "a third party" in the sharpened struggle with labor (qtd. in
to Industry Must Speak!, the aim of the
Part 18, Exhibit 3873, p. 8031).56 According
was
to
outdoor advertising strategy
proclaim "on the billboards of the nation that
'There Is No Way Like the American Way' with Its 'World's Highest Standard of
"
'World's Shortest Working Hours,' 'World's Highest Wages'
(qtd. in Part
Living,'
17, Exhibit 3839, p. 7695) (Fig. 6). The unifying slogan derived from the first of a se
ries of broad themes conceived in 1934 and outlined originally in eight free booklets
under the rubric of the "You and Industry Series." The theme was "The
published
American
tional
Way?An
Association
explanation
of Manufacturers
of how
saw
our
as
system
operates,"
"a constructive,
part
of what
affirmative
story
the Na
of
in
to prepare, but itwould have

dustry."57 In all, the billboard campaign cost $53,461.97
cost almost $1.25 million if billboard space had not been furnished free by outdoor
INDUSTRYSPEAKS TO MILLIONS
WITH COLOR * PICTURES FACTS
WORKING HOURS
WORLD'S SHORTEST
'^f^
: ?*%*:"'
!&3KZ?
STANDARD
WORLD'SHIGHEST
OF LIVING
OOCaRS
WORLDS
HIGHEST WAGES
mm
of Manufacturers
of the United States leaflet, "Along the Highways
Fig 6. National Association
the outdoor campaign, "There's No Way Like The American Way,"
1937.
ica," describing
of Amer
22
John Tagg
advertising companies contacted through the General Outdoor Advertising Associa

tion.58Nothing on the posters identified either the publisher or the sponsor. That was,
as we
have
seen,
standard
practice
for
But, pressed on the point by the Senate

association's
executive
the National
blustered:
vice-president,
Association
subcommittee, Walter
"They
were
of Manufacturers.
B. Weisenburger,
upon
the
the American
Way, and the conditions that surround our industrial life, because we felt itwas im
portant that theAmerican people commence to have some full appreciation of the in
dustrial system as presented from the manufacturer's
standpoint, and there we were
presenting the American Way as being superior to any other industrial system in the
rest of the world, and did not necessarily think at that time that itwas necessary to
Part 17, p.
identify a 'hurrah for America'"
(qtd. in Senate Committee, Hearings,
7466).
The distribution
for this "hurrah for America," as for the "Harmony ads," was
and
general. As Ernest T. Weir, Chairman of the National In
certainly widespread
dustrial Information Committee, boasted:
Industry's first outdoor campaign shows the happy America which industry
. . .
helped to create
reaching every class and group through 60,000 billboard
advertisements placed throughout the country . . . blazing the trail in placing
facts about industrial progress and achievements before the public with pictures
and
color.
Millions will see it... millions will read it... telling and repeating tomil
lions the truth that "There's No Way Like The American Way." (qtd. in Part 35,
Exhibit 5485-E, p. 14411)59
Yet the National Association
licity
campaigns
on
the
sites
of Manufacturers
of protracted
also pointedly
strikes
and
concentrated
coordinated
its pub
strikebreaking
in
terventions, and on localities torn by civic strife spilling over from the industrial
arena. This is what brought officers and officials before Robert La Follette's Senate
subcommittee investigation of violations of free speech and the rights of labor.Mon
theMahoning Valley, Ohio; Johnstown, Pennsyl
roe, Flint, and Lansing, Michigan;
vania; Tonawanda, New York: these were the place names that had filled the pages of
the association's publications and then echoed back through the hearing room. Yet
the civil conflicts born of ecological disaster down the Ohio and Mississippi
valleys
and across the dust-choked farmlands of the Great Plains posed as much of a threat
to national cohesion and were not without their own relation to the drives of indus
trialization. Flood, dereliction, and sit-down strikes jostled together on the pages of
Life in the winter and early spring of 1937. There was a reason for the National As
to be there, incognito, in Louisville, Kentucky. There was
sociation of Manufacturers
a relationship to be brought out, just as Life had cause enough to think about the role
of mass-produced
images in the new economy of publicity and public opinion for
mation that had reinvested corporate affairs and the political field in the United
States
in the mid-1930s.
This
was
not
the magazine's
purpose,
of
course,
any more
than it was the purpose of Bourke-White's

photograph. Her headline picture de
pended on this topicality, this tacit sense of suspended connections; itwas part of the
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
23
strategy worked to re
photograph's currency in February 1937. Yet, Bourke-White's
of photographic meaning
into an immediately
organize the unruly dissemination
readable message whose rhetorical condensation and graphic simplification would
absorb particularities and take on the quality of a symbol. In this, other stories were
lost, even to readers in 1937, but the thickness of meaning could not be entirely flat
tened
out.
This is not all, perhaps, that shows itself and cannot be closed off by the finality
of a reading imposed by the dialectic of the manifest message. Since we have begun
to confront the overdetermination
of meaning in the photograph, here is the story of
a dream. Written
in characteristic style, it comes from Bourke-White's
autobiogra
phy Portrait of Myself, published in 1963. In this stylized narrative, itself strikingly
the dream is placed some
subject to processes of displacement and condensation,
time in the first half of 1936, though this is not entirely clear in the compressed nar
rative time that moves very rapidly from five days in 1934, in which Bourke-White
flew from the Dakotas to the Texas panhandle photographing the drought for Fortune
to the "miracle" in which she would happen to hear about Erskine Cald
magazine,
well's project to collaborate with a photographer on an authentic book about people
and conditions in the South (Portrait 107-13). The dream falls, in this carefully plot
ted account, "a week or two" before the miraculous event and is offered as final ex
rising determination to repudiate her lucrative career as
planation of Bourke-White's
an advertising photographer, whose staple accounts in the early 1930s were Buick
cars
and Goody
ear Tires.60
Like propaganda, set aside from "real life," advertising marked what had to be
repudiated but could not be escaped.61 In a convenient distinction, Bourke-White
would later insist that her work in the field of advertising gave her "practice in preci
but
sion,"
that
her
"style"
and,
"even
more
importantly,"
her
"convictions"
were
formed
in her experience photographing

the heavy industries of Cleveland and the
Midwest
On
March
9
1936, however, Bourke-White wrote to Erskine
(Portrait 80).
Caldwell that: "I have felt keenly for some time that I was turning my camera too
often to advertising subjects and too little in the direction of something that might
have some social significance" (Caldwell Papers, Box #1).62 In the search for "social
significance,"
however,
Bourke-White's
returns. In her autobiography,

in the summer of 1936:
"unreal"
again, Bourke-White
past
was
apt
to
stage
unexpected
writes of traveling with Caldwell
As we penetrated the more destitute regions of the South, I was struck by the
frequent reminders I found of the advertising world I thought I had left behind.
Here the people really used the ads. They plastered them directly on their
so
houses to keep the wind out. Some sharecropper shacks were wrapped
snugly in huge billboard posters advertising magic pain-killers and Buttercup
Snuff that the home itself disappeared from sight. The effect was bizarre.
And inside, the effect was equally unexpected. The walls from floor to
ceiling were papered in old newspapers and colorful advertising pages torn
from magazines. Very practical, Erskine explained to me. Good as insulation
against either heat or chill, and it's clean and can be replaced for next to noth
24
John Tagg
ing. I had the uneasy feeling that if I explored around enough,

vertisements I had done myself. (127-28) (see Fig. 7)
Iwould
find ad
Guilt and unease. The disappearance of the home. They suggest a rather different re
lationship between advertising and the real than that to which we have to cling in the
midst of the Louisville flood. The recoil in Bourke-White's
is imme
autobiography
a
remembers
"a
little
however.
She
named
has
twin sis
diate,
girl
Begonia." Begonia
ter: "They went to school on alternate days, so as to share their single nondescript
coat and their one pair of shoes. And here, right behind Begonia's wistful little face
as she told me this, was this spectacular and improbable background showing all the
world's goods. Begonia and her sister could look their walls over and find a complete
range of shoes, jackets and coats. But never would they find that real coat and real
pair of shoes which would take the second twin to school" (128). The real is secured
again in the foreground, as an antidote to the "spectacular and improbable back
Fig. 7. Margaret Bourke-White,

Modern Age Books Inc., 1937).
You Have
Seen Their Faces
(New York:
The Melancholy
But
ground."
sisters
the
real
is also
an
over
to
themselves
give
enigma
that will
looking
and
to
Realism
never
be
the world
of Walker Evans
however
found,
of magazines.
25
much
the
the
On
one
hand, the real settles the issue. On the other, itwill never resolve the troubling narra
tive of doubling, separation, and loss that cannot restore the missing twin, the miss
ing coat, and the missing pair of shoes.
I have not forgotten the dream. In Portrait of Myself,
the encounter with the
twin follows the repudiation of the world of advertising precipitated by the dream
that
ruptures
the "circle
of madness."
Bourke-White
writes:
The circle of madness was closing on itself. Rubber was chasing rubber around
in a vacuum. I longed to see the real world which lay beyond the real tire, where
things did not have to look convincing, they just had to be true. I felt I could
never again face a shiny automobile stuffed with vapid smiles. Never again
could I build and rebuild the road that led nowhere.
Then I had a dream. I still remember the mood of terror. Great unfriendly
shapes were rushing toward me, threatening to crush me down. As they drew
closer, I recognized them as the Buick cars I had been photographing. They
were moving toward me in a menacing zigzag course, their giant hoods raised
in jagged alarming shapes as though determined to swallow me. Run as fast as
I could, I could not escape them. As they moved faster, I began to stumble, and
as they towered over me, pushing me down, I woke up to find that I had fallen
out of bed and was writhing on the floor with my back strained. (112)63
Itmay be remarked that the narrative in which the dream has its function and the re
of space that echo
ported dream itself turn on images, tropes, and compressions
those of the Louisville photograph of 1937: the counterposing of "the real world"
and the world of appearance; the "shiny automobile stuffed with vapid smiles"; the
road to nowhere; the giant hood, towering above, moving inexorably forwards, push
ing down, crushing. This repetition alone would be of interest, irrespective of
whether one thought one was dealing with the work of a dream in 1936 or the work
of a text in 1963. In the story of Bourke-White's
life, as, in the later 1950s, she
wished it to be told, the episode of the nightmare is contrived as a turning point. The
retelling of the dream alleged to have disturbed her sleep almost exactly a year be
fore the Louisville photograph was made invests the figure of the advancing car with
portentous personal meaning, not untypical of the operation of dream images in the
of
genre
ment
life
to which
stories
of meaning,
whether
Bourke-White's
consciously
wrought
autobiography
or unbidden,
conforms.
must
invest
Such
certainly
compli
cate the question of what we are to read in the 1937 photograph. At the same time,
the lurid imagery and melodramatic
hyperbole of the written account, even if ex
a
of
the
at
still
less calculated level, as excessive in relation to
genre,
pected
register,
their narrative function, speaking more than may be intended of paranoid fantasies of
prostration,
meaning,
White,
no
and
suffocation,
engulfment,
Whether
engorgement.
dream or not, the excess of Bourke-White's

doubt,
for
the motivation
though psychobiography
of
so driven
a woman
story has meaning.

as
Margaret
It has
Bourke
is not my purpose here. Such speculation may well
26
John Tagg
the pale and beside the point, but what it is harder to say is that the tropo
be
autobiography, photograph?can
logical activity of the texts in play?dream,
conveniently closed to the uncertain reaches that have opened up. The least we might
say for the photograph is that, once such relays of meaning come to animate the
be beyond
image,
is no
there
convenient
way
to exclude
them.
Or,
to put
it another
there
way,
is,
inescapably, an unexcludable excess of meaning in the photograph that does not lend
even
itself to didactic reduction, or to functionalism, or to efficient communication,
in an image such as this, in which semiotic economy and discursive frame work to
curtail meaning as exhaustively determined and complete. The economy of accom
practice of engaged journalism
plished meaning is in doubt, even in Bourke-White's
in which
the message
must
always
arrive.
As I have said, it was not only photojournalists who, in the early months of
rivers. Pho
1937, found themselves in the flood plain of the Ohio and Mississippi
were
to
for
the
also
and
filmmakers
government
working
dispatched
tographers
record the disaster and the relief effort and to send back images thatmight be useful
to various forms of governmental,
interagency, and public advocacy. Carl Mydans
inMarch of the previous year, photographing
the flooded
had been in Louisville
streets for the Historical Section of the Division of Information of the Resettlement
In 1937, itwas Walker Evans and Edwin Locke who were sent out
Administration.64
office on a "quick trip to flood," this time headed further down
from theWashington
flowed together, pouring out
river, to the point where the Ohio and theMississippi
their flood waters into the valley bottom south of Cairo.65
This was no freewheeling
assignment. The photographers were to link up in
and
Willard Van Dyke, who were gathering dramatic
with
Pare
Lorentz
Memphis
didactic
for
Lorentz's
documentary film, The River. They were also to record
footage
the
catastrophic
effect
of
land mismanagement
in
the
upper
valleys
and
the
short
term emergency response by governmental and local agencies to the resultant inun
to be out of
relieved
dation of the river plain. Evans was characteristically
for
from
routine
but
with
his
low
and
away
jobs,
reputation
production
Washington
intractable to direction, he may also have guessed he was
and a way of working
Section for which he
being given a final chance by the cash-strapped Historical
worked as Information Specialist, on a salary of $3,000 a year.66 Clearly, Evans was
eye of Locke, who duly reported back to Roy Stryker,
Administration's
photographic record and publicity
Evans thought Locke on as
arm.67 For his part, while maintaining
terms,
friendly
in
like
"a
communist
the
commisar
Winter
Palace" (Evans diary, 2
looked
signment
Evans
Archive, Diaries, 1994.250.98). Certainly, there is pomposity
February 1937,
in Locke's letters to Stryker: "I had a job annoying Walker out of
and condescension
on 4 February, "but today in Forrest
his lassitude," he would write from Memphis
as
am
sure
never
he
worked
I
he
has before" (Stryker Papers).68
City, Arkansas,
meant
to be under the watchful
office chief of the Resettlement
Forrest City was the destination. Having leftWashington

the afternoon of 30 January, Locke and Evans had driven west,
Knoxville,
and
Savannah,
2 February. The following
Tennessee,
arriving
day, they moved
in Memphis
at three o'clock
around
on
through Lexington,
one
on Tuesday,
on by train to Forrest City, Arkansas,
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
27
farmlands, stranded farm houses, and the frightening

photographing waterlogged
on
either side of the raised railroad tracks.69 Over the next
rush of the swollen river
five days, despite Locke's comment, the two worked hard to document the broken
the ruined homes, the refugees, and the relief response. But they
flood defenses,
also could not avoid recording forced black labor on the levees, segregated food
lines, and the racially separated camps for victims of the flood. This was far from
Evans's first assignment in the South, but what he saw across the wall of segrega
tion still drew him in.70
After his first full day working in Forrest City, Evans noted in his small, red
leather engagement
book:
To white refugee camps in the morning, a sunny day. Refugees being brought
in, tents set up in a lot near high school, by CCC [Civilian Conservation Corps]
men. This is all in charge of Red Cross who want us to be sure to include their
insignia in pictures. Careful not to do this. People seem thoroughly depressed,
mostly worries about future. We did a good deal of work and got tired. Negro
camp at other end of town much larger, much more interesting. Negroes really
deflated, more so than I've ever seen them. I tried a few shots with synchronized
flash inside the large compress where the sick were lying in an assortment of
ill-mannered but wanted at the
fancy iron beds (their own?). Felt completely
same time to make just these pictures. (Evans diary, 4 February 1937, Evans
Archive, Diaries, 1994.250.98)71
Ill-mannered or not, he was back the next day, and, in fact, itwas in these camps for
African American flood refugees that Evans would make the only images he would
later choose to publish and reuse from what has been judged a failed assignment.72
One of these images was a photograph, taken with flash and a four-by-five view
camera,
almost
at eye-level
with
a young
African
American
woman,
seemingly
one
of the sick in assorted iron bedsteads, in the overcrowded cotton compress building
in Forrest City (Fig. 8). Evans appears to have held the negative back from the Re
that ac
settlement file and, in 1938, he included a print from it in the monograph
in
he
exhibition?an
exhibition
which
Art
solo
Museum
of
Modern
his
companied
the
series
of
black
in
Forrest
two
from
the
different
seg
City
refugees
images
hung
"Arkansas Flood
regated relief station.73 In the book, American Photographs,
on
as
the
in
Part
One
1937"
44,
page, falling be
appears
plate
uncaptioned
Refugee,
tween the uninviting boarding house bed of Evans's friend, John Cheever, and white
residents relaxing outside their house in Ossining, New York (see
working-class
continuities of time and place are en
Evans, American Photographs). Documentary
tirely dispensed with. The sequencing makes the refugee image all the more enig
matic, no longer segregated, but also kept from too easy a juxtaposition with the
detail from a "Minstrel Showbill" discovered on a wall inAlabama in the summer of
1936, placed here as plate 42, following and echoing an image of white entertain
ment in Coney Island. The conclusive meanings characteristic of journalistic con
trasts are thus withheld. The relationships of image to image are not those of thesis
and antithesis, but of rhyme, repetition, discrepancy, and reversal.74 No image finally
28
John Tagg
Evans, American
Fig. 8. Walker
(New York: Museum
Photographs
of Modern Art, 1938), plate 44.
adjudicates
tailed
any other. The order is deliberate,
but the process of reading is not cur
in advance.
A second image from Forrest City, Arkansas, that would also find its way into
publication shows a segregated food line, not unlike the one Margaret Bourke-White
saw in Louisville at around the same time. This photograph belongs to an extended
series of 35 mm exposures made in the black refugee camp with a Leica, all on the
same day.75 Tightly cropped by the hand-held camera, it frames a woman's hand
holding a tin plate and a man's hand holding a broken china bowl (Fig. 9). The fig
ures are cut off at the forearms and ankles. The dishes stand out against the dark
clothing. Without comparison with other frames on the same roll of film, it is hard to
grasp the context: no spatial setting is given, no wider explanatory frame, no sup
porting
ground,
not
even
feet,
or heads,
or faces.76
By
Evans's
standards
of emotional
distance, however, the photograph might still seem vulnerable to being taken for an
image of outrage or pity and, indeed, it appears itwas.
In late April 1938, Evans's photograph was among eighty-one prints selected
and arranged by Arthur Rothstein and Russell Lee for a major Historical Section ex
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
in Line for Food at the Camp

Standing
Fig. 9. Walker Evans, "Forrest City, Arkansas, Negroes
1937." (Prints and Photographs Division,
Flood Refugees,
Library of Congress)
February
29
for
hibit at the "First International Photography Exposition," at the Grand Central Palace
in New York.77 Evans went to the show and wrote to Stryker, "the whole thing is so
commercial itmade me sick" (Evans to Stryker, 21 April 1938, Stryker Papers). This
was something less than tactful, since Stryker regarded the exhibit as a coup, boast
ing that "Even Steichen went to the show in a perfunctory manner and got a surprise
when he ran into our section" (Stryker to Locke, 26 April 1938, Stryker Papers). It
was, indeed, Edward Steichen who, that same year, would edit a selection of Farm
photographs from the Grand Central Palace exhibition for
Security Administration
in
Annual 1939. The selection included two of Evans's
Camera
U.S.
publication
small-format Arkansas flood pictures, together with another by Edwin Locke,
though the anonymity of the "F. S. A." photographs and the style of presentation
were not designed to please Evans. Stryker, on the other hand, was in rapture and
of Agriculture
administrators
bought several copies to pass on to Department
to
in
22
December
Dorothea
1938; qtd.
Hurley 136). He was all the
Lange,
(Stryker
more pleased in that, introducing the forty-one selected photographs, Steichen was
insistent that itwas the collective achievement of Stryker's photographers as a group
that had to be celebrated. Even so, Steichen conceded, "For sheer story telling im
. . .would be hard to beat"
pact, the picture of the hands with the plates on page 46
seems
to
the
view
of
Richard
This
have
been
also
(Steichen 44).78
Wright and Edwin
on
food
line
the
dustcover of their
in
would
Evans's
Rosskam, who,
1941,
put
picture
12
Voices.
For all the
Million
Black
rhetorical
book,
photo-documentary
sweeping,
be one of
in
the
it
would
his
of
black
conditions
of
record
South,
living
complexity
two
in
the
entire
Evans
photographs
publication.
only
30
John Tagg
Yet in terms of "story telling," the Arkansas image is hardly demonstrative.

In
contrast toMargaret Bourke-White's
view of the Louisville flood, it has no polemic,
though one might obviously be supplied. Nor does itmake an emotional appeal to
the viewer through an imaginary dramatization of the act of looking. Itmay be in
formative, but not in the way of a government report. The focus of its attention seems
to be on the smallest differences of gesture and anatomy affecting the ways the two
hands hold the two utensils. To make the image, Evans must have been embarrass
spec
ingly close, squatting down in the mud, hardly himself a confidence-inspiring
tacle. No wonder he wrote that he "felt completely ill-mannered" in his urgent drive
"to make just these pictures" (Evans diary, 4 February 1937, Evans Archive, Diaries,
1994.250.98).
On the morning of 9 February, however, all photographic activity in and around
Forrest City was cut short when Evans woke with influenza. Sickness and fever kept
him in bed until the fourteenth and work could not begin again until the seventeenth,
two days afterMargaret Bourke-White's
flood photograph had appeared as the lead in
that week's issue of Life. By then the assignment was, to all intents and purposes,
over. On Saturday, 20 February, Evans and Locke scrapped plans to go on to Paducah
and Louisville and started back, driving through Tennessee and Virginia, stopping by
the roadside in Kingwood, West Virginia, while Locke photographed another of the
Association
of Manufacturers'
billboards that had first caught his eye in
on
p.m.
25
6
Thursday,
February, Evans and Locke were inWashing
Memphis.79 By
National
ton, where,
less
than
a month
later,
Evans
would
have
lunch
and
an
"extraordinary
conversation" with Roy Stryker (Evans diary, 20 March 1937, Evans Archive, Diaries,
1994.250.98).80 Newly transferred to the Department of Agriculture and no longer in
had fallen under heavy Congressional
dependent, the Resettlement Administration
Rexford
Its
chief
administrator,
Tugwell, had resigned a month after the
scrutiny.
1936 election and, with the programs he championed in doubt, the Division of Infor
mation's budget had been cut. On 23 March, Evans would receive his final dismissal
notice. No more bi-weekly checks for $120. His work for the government was over.81
On the other hand, the work of his negatives was not. With the exception of
those promised first to Fortune for the story on "Three Tenant Farmers" that turned
into the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, all Evans's work in the picture file of
was gov
later the Farm Security Administration,
the Resettlement Administration,
ernment property, available for circulation without his further consent. This is what
happened, for example, to a large-format photograph Evans had made inAtlanta in
1936 (Fig. 10). The photograph, captioned "Houses in Atlanta," appeared without
in the 1938 photo-documentary
book Land of the Free (91),
Evans's foreknowledge
published with Stryker's blessing by poet Archibald MacLeish.
MacLeish was a figure of national stature: a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, editor
at Fortune, and occasional writer for Life, with connections in the Roosevelt admin
istration and the backing of a major publishing house. His goal, as in earlier experi
ments with a dance drama and radio play, was to find ways to shape public opinion
through the direct and public use of poetry, hybridizing his writing with forms drawn
from mass media, such as the newsreel and the short documentary film. For his part,
Stryker knew that he needed to have his files put to work in a public way in order to
The Melancholy
Fig.
10. Walker
tographs Division,
Evans,
"Houses
and Billboards
Realism
in Atlanta,
of Walker Evans
1936."
(Prints
31
and Pho
Library of Congress.)
justify his hard-pressed budget. He was, therefore, more than eager to cooperate with
MacLeish's
proposal to compose a poetic photographic book using the Historical
Section's collection. In fact, he took it upon himself to pull an initial set of five hun
to Section pho
dred photographs to start MacLeish
off and wrote enthusiastically
"a
series
of
Russell
Lee
that
the
book
would
contain
pictures which will
tographer
portray the people left behind after the empire builders have taken the forests, the
ore, and the top soil" (Stryker to Lee, April 1937; qtd. inNatanson 203).
MacLeish began work with Stryker's selection in July and August of 1937, edit
ing, sequencing, developing new orders for agency photographers, and writing his
(Land 89), like the soundtrack to one of Pare Lorentz's
poetic "accompaniment"
documentary
movies,
trying,
as he
put
it, to give
the photographs
"a
theme,
a run
ning, continuing sort of choral voice" (qtd. in Drabeck and Ellis 95).82 Like the
"Voice of God" commentary in The Plow That Broke the Plains and The River, the
"choral voice" of MacLeish's
Land of the Free is sonorous, grandiloquent, and af
Southern
fectedly populist, mixing
Agrarian themes of the betrayal of Eden with
themes
of
capitalist exploitation in a way that seemed convincing at
quasi-Marxist
the time to so many east coast intellectuals,
including Evans's friend Lincoln
in high oratorical style in the first person plural, MacLeish's
Kirstein. Delivered
verse rises to anger but has little depth as an indictment of the American system,
never descending to the level of specific institutions or concrete alternatives. Its pref
for larger histrionic gestures and
erence?part
Popular Front, part Frontier Myth?is
the overarching rhetoric of an imaginary collectivity that transcends private interests
and rises above the violence of the class struggle. On this would-be
epic plane,
32
John Tagg
"Sound Track" sought to give voice to the faces of the "eroded human
MacLeish's
beings" in the photographs, conjuring up a metaphoric unity for the images far re
moved from the day-to-day concerns of the photographers and the m?tonymie
real
ism of their archival project (MacLeish qtd. inDrabeck and Ellis 95).83
Evans's photographs did not yield easily to this enveloping context. His mea
sured view of an empty street in downtown Atlanta was especially oddly placed in
MacLeish's
troubled meditation on rural decay, the collapse of the land, and the loss
of the promise of plenty that asked if "the liberty's back of us," now the "Land's
gone," "Or if there's liberty a man can mean that's /Men: not land" (Land 29, 87).
Bled to the edge of the page and with no identifying caption, "Houses in Atlanta"
orchestration of image and text, next to page
falls about halfway through MacLeish's
43, opposite the line: "And we're not telling them: not from our own front doors."
"We're not telling them" marks the breakdown of what "we've been telling our
selves" for "a hundred and fifty years" about liberty, self-evident
American
"we
know,"
"We're
front
(3).
It is one
aren't
asking."84
doors
these
of
sure,"
It is not
are,
since
a series
"we
of
repeated
refrains?"we
get wondering"?that
turn,
on page
clear
they
are not
43 who
visible
"we're
and,
truths, and being
can't
on
not
in any
telling"
case,
"we
say,"
the very
or,
may
don't
last page,
be
into
whose
indeed,
unreachable.
in
It is also uncertain what meaning
there might be for a radicalized Agrarianism
boarded up Victorian houses in the heart of Atlanta.
The sequence only adds to the puzzle (Figs. 11, 12, and 13). Evans's urban
street scene is preceded by a view of a "bleeding hillside" in a Virginia valley, erod
hard-pan
ing away one hour after rain, and is followed by an image of wind-stripped,
land inAlabama with a seemingly abandoned farm house (see "Index of Pictures" in
Land 91). The continuity of context is far from clear. What it is that the photographs
bear witness to is not readily discernible. The "chorus" goes on gesturing and de
claiming, but the action itself is hard to follow, even though MacLeish maintained
that it was the photographs, "the power and the stubborn inward livingness of these
vivid
American
documents,"
that
carried
the narrative,
only
"illustrated
by
poem"
(see "Notes" in Land 89). The intransigent particularities of the photographs have, of
course, been stitched up. Bound into MacLeish's
book, the photographs are over
ruled by a uniform graphic code, subsumed by sequence, and interpellated by a text
that calls them into the epic space of the collective subject as it emerges into its his
that is, they prove intractable. Evans's photograph is
torical consciousness?unless,
more "stubborn" than most. As the thick black graphic line and the voice-over of the
"Sound Track" move resolutely on, "trying to find words for the purgatory of the De
pression, for the American hopes and expectations and what had happened to them"
(MacLeish qtd. in Drabeck and Ellis 80), it seems to be left stranded. Sprung from
worn-out fields, bracketed by rural decay, it goes on standing in another semantic
space,
unassimilable
and
unreadable.
tear inMacLeish's
book did not seem to worry its readers. Published in
Brace
and Company, Land of the Free was never a bestseller
Harcourt
April 1938 by
it
did
receive
but
heavy coverage in the press, and not just in the small magazines.
hailed it as "a document of real social significance"
York
The New
Herald-Tribune
saw it as a "Poem for Our Day": "a grim and
Times
New
York
(Lechlitner 6). The
This
cankered to rock tnd twni>pw)

Whole <ou?whm
On? acre in twenty
Two firmen info? tenant? the rtft of flttff?
monf^e fe*" llirct row?;
Mot-*?| t*e <?mpif>)f'i
Hoe!fg their own on thefourth tifi their bock?
Th?tHtd landof the Mtutwop* Vitiey?
The mott tfrtfXK.?hftbttatiof?
for men in th*
WorSd ?*ywher?"'goldenrodwhere the corn
A qu?ter endmote of It?

guMtniud where the com wm
Fig.
11. Archibald
MacLeish,
Lam/ o/riie Free
(New York: Harcourt,
Brace
and Co.
illpf'ft^^^
Fig.
12. Archibald
MacLeish,
Land of the Free
Brace
and Co.,
Wotfc?ttw>filiyil
CMfrjrlwMt:
mw
^%jwe-*^. ri*1^
I
Fig.
13. Archibald
MacLeish,
Land of the Free
Brace
and Co.
John Tagg
36
of collaboration"
beautiful book, a masterpiece
(Jack 2). Evans was less taken. A
couple of months after publication, he sent Roy Stryker a note with a clipping from
a book-trade pamphlet reproducing, without acknowledgment,
a plate from iMnd of
the Free: Evans's own 1936 photograph of the elaborately-carved wooden porch of a
boarding house on Fourth Avenue in Birmingham, Alabama. Evans insisted that he
was sending the cutting to Stryker only "as an item of mild interest and amusement,
not as a howl of pain." But the clipping was annotated with the one word: "Gawd!"
(Evans to Stryker, 17 June 1938, Stryker Papers).85
Evans, of course, had understood from the start the risks he was taking for his
work by entering government employment. At one level, he seemed to think he could
a contempt for bureaucracy and by continuing
deal with these risks by maintaining
to operate behind the back of officialdom. He made duplicate negatives and addi
tional prints and held them back for his own use, just as he padded his often thin file
submissions with work made before his official employment, for purposes other than
those of government record and publicity. His distrust and self-interest did not stop
here. From the outset, he had worried about interference and the taint of association
that government work might bring. In 1935, still in negotiations over various possi
ble government jobs, defensive and self-protective as ever, he tried to clarify issues
in his own mind, scribbling down lists headed "Want" "Will give" and then, on a
second
sheet
in an accusatory
of paper,
tone:
"never
under
any
asked
circumstances
to do anything more than these things. Mean never make photographic

statements
for the government [or do photographic chores for gov. or anyone in gov. no matter
how powerful, (inserted)]?this
is pure record not propaganda. The value and if you
even
the
value
for
the government lies in the record itself which in
like,
propaganda
the long run will prove an intelligent and farsighted thing to have done. NO POLI
TICS whatever"
Notes
1920s-1930s,
(Evans Archive, Miscellaneous
1994.250.4,
in
measures
In equal
#12).86
an unattached
folder
breath:
tense
"mean":
or
these
no
with
person,
are
the
and
intransigent
verbs
adverb;
with
identifiable
fragments
of
no
clear
addressee.
speech
he
Evans's
naive,
subject,
own,
"Will
start
in mid
undecidable
unqualified,
"Want,"
cannot
notes
"asked,"
give,"
into which
he
cannot
quite insert himself. Without doubt, something has to be defended and protected. But
even to speak about this "pure" thing, in itself, proves impossible.
Evans would still be at itmore than a year after his summary dismissal from
government service, even while preparing for his exhibition and major publication
with theMuseum of Modern Art. At one moment, he would be jotting down notes for
his "file on STRYKER."87 At another moment, he would be writing a letter to Stryker
that he might later think better of sending, on "the matter of the extent of my free
dom in th[e] choice of pictures
that
the Museum
"is
to bring
for this Museum

. . . out
as an
example
book": "a book about and by me"

of
the work
of
an artist,"
and
in
which the number of Resettlement pictures reproduced "has been determined solely
on the grounds of my opinion of their worth as pictures" (Evans to Stryker, 16 July
folder #57).88 The book
1938, Evans Archive, American Photographs,
1994.250.57,
as
focused
Evans's
not hesitate to point
would
anxieties, especially
clearly
Stryker
out that "about half of the photographs in the book are from negatives in the Depart
ment
of Agriculture
files"
(Stryker to Mrs.
L. A. Collings,
Jr. [Frances Strunsky
The Melancholy
Realism
37
of Walker Evans
at the Museum
of Modern Art], 19 October
1938,
Collins, head of publications
Evans Archive, American Photographs,
1994.250.57, folder #41). Even the prepara
tion of a belated formal contract had Evans scribbling notes, speaking of himself in
the third person, insisting that the book appeared "without a hint of commercial
compromise," that it was he who had "installed the [present] style of government
still photography," and that he had "retired from the government" "because of the
to play with and cater to commercial inter
readiness of the bureaus inWashington
ests and to aim at [immediate] publicity [more] than at [straight] historical record
1994.250.57, folder #12).89
ing" (Evans Archive, American Photographs,
Evans's anxiousness returned as he sketched a "Plan Or Arrangement Of Mu
seum Book." His first thought was that he wanted it recorded on the inside front flap
of the dustcover that he had worked "more or less independently" since 1928 and
that he himself had "arranged and divided and ordered" the selection of photographs
"made by him from this ten years' work" (Evans Archive, American Photographs,
1994.250.57, folder #7).90 As his thinking developed, he made notes for "PEOPLE
"a book of pictures without captions," on the back of what
BY PHOTOGRAPHY,"
seems to be an old photographic mount, and still felt the need to write down that
"this work is arranged in seriousness not journalism or not a trick" (Evans Archive,
1994.250.57, folder #8).91 Then he began painfully drafting,
and
redrafting an explanatory "NOTE."92 He wanted to draw
annotating, amending,
a clear line between the compromised commercialism
of contemporary photojour
nalism and the picture selection in his book. His aim, he said, was "to sketch an im
American
Photographs,
but
correct,
portant,
American
the period,
commonly
1994.250.57,
Photographs,
he
argued,
corrupted
was
too
corrupt
use
of
the
camera"
(Evans
Archive,
folder #11, p. I).93 The pictorial journalism of

to produce,
other
than
by
accident,
"records
which will become valuable in themselves," images capable of revealing "the move
ments and changes or, again, the conflicts which in passing become the body of the
history of civilizations" (1). Turning, "perhaps sick," from this commercialism, with
its parade of pictures of "prominent people," Evans asked his reader to "think of the
general run of the social mill: [these (deleted)] anonymous people who come and go
in the cities and who move on the land. It is on what they look like now; what is in
thier [sic] faces and in the windows and the streets beside and around them; what
they are wearing and what they are riding in, and on how they are gesturing, that we
need
to concentrate,
consciously,
with
the camera"
(2).
Evans's "NOTE" would not be published; nor would any of the tortured ver
sions of his "Acknowledgments," which had said too much about a history of intel
lectual and emotional debts. As it appeared, American Photographs was emptied of
all direct captions and almost all words of his own, leaving the images facing bare
white pages, cleansed of everything but the plate numbers, with brief titles consigned
had contracted to
to pages at the end of each of the two parts. The acknowledgments
two unsigned sentences, recognizing permissions from the Farm Security Adminis
tration, Harper and Brothers, and the editors of The Hound and Horn. A further
blank page had the inscription: "J. S. N."94 Then came a page with the single head
ing: "PART ONE." Nothing else was to intervene between the reader and the pho
tographs. Yet,
something
still remained
of what Evans
had wanted
to say in his
38
John Tagg
defensiveness.
It survived in traces in Lincoln Kirstein's
afterword and in what
Frances Collins excerpted from Kirstein's commentary for the jacket text. It also sur
vived, in greatly shrunken form, in a curt and impersonal sentence added to the ac
"The responsibility
for the selection of the pictures used in this
knowledgments:
book has rested with the author, and the choice has been determined by his opinion:
therefore they are presented without sponsorship or connection with the policies,
aesthetic or political, of any of the institutions, publications or government agencies
some of the work has been done" (Evans, American Photographs n.p.).
The sentence marked what still rankled. It was the stunted heir to all the notes,
the unsent letter, the drafting and redrafting, and the curdled prose. Masked as re
straint and good taste, itwas the strangulated sound of words that seemed to have to
be cut off in the throat. Prevented from speaking and compelled to speak, Evans
for which
seemed to want to disown all debts, to disallow all frames of meaning, all the nets in
which his work might be caught, even, or especially, those that had prompted and oc
casioned the photographic acts whose results made up the corpus of the book. Every
thing had to be purged from the space of the "pure record." Yet, the photograph
cannot stand alone, in its own discursive space; itmust enter circulation, pass from
hand to hand, in some form. The medium of this pure circulation was the book. Not
the photo-book as Archibald MacLeish
conceived it, a filmic blending of words and
Not
the
book
that had become something of a publish
pictures.
photo-documentary
fashion
the
since
of
and Erskine Caldwell's
appearance
ing
Margaret Bourke-White
You Have Seen Their Faces in 1937, and that critics were then claiming as a new
medium (see McCausland
and Rosskam).
It was to be a new kind of photographic
a
was
no
book
which
there
for
real
book,
precedent in photographic publishing, se
vere and restrained from the first, bound in "Bible cloth," with no image on the
95
cover.
Still, the book did carry the imprimatur of theMuseum of Modern Art. The Mu
seum had supported Evans's work since 1933 with exhibitions and commissions.
It
seemed to be the one institution with whose policies, "aesthetic or political," Evans
was not unwilling to be associated, even if he thought little of its director, Alfred H.
Barr, and had open contempt for its "so called curator of photography," Beaumont
Newhall.96 This exemption of the Museum,
despite distaste for its social aspect, is
odd.
Certainly,
the Museum
conferred
status,
and Evans
wanted
it seen
that
the Mod
ern was bringing out American Photographs

"as an example of the work of an artist"
to
16
Evans
American
(Evans
Archive,
Stryker,
July 1938,
Photographs,
Yet
folder
Evans
also
defined
his
notion
of "pure record" as "non
1994.250.57,
#57).
artistic" photography, as distinct from "romantic art-photography" and New Vision
as it was from the commercial corruption of photojournalism
and
experimentalism
the "advertising values" of photography's "Chrysler period."97 It is not clear, there
fore, how he could blind himself to the framing machinery of theMuseum and the
way it worked to establish his reputation, establish the terms of an appropriate criti
cal discourse, and establish a space of difference for his work. "There's the prob
of Modern Art.
lem," Evans would later say of his connection with the Museum
"How do you get around Establishment when something is establishing you?" (qtd.
in Trachtenberg, "A Book" 238).98
The Melancholy
One must be cautious here, however,

as
Museum
a condition
his
of
work.
Realism
of Walker Evans
in judging Evans's
It is tempting,
for
39
incorporation
to
example,
of the
the mono
see
as a replication of
chrome space that opens in the pages of American Photographs
museum:
a
erasure
contrived space of
that is the con
the white cube of themodernist
a
dition for the apparent self-presentation of Art. Yet such space, extending and puri
fying the function of the frame, did not exist for photography at this time. American
took shape precisely in the time in which theMuseum of Modern Art's
Photographs
new international-style building at 11West Fifty-Third Street was under construc
tion. The exhibition took place in a temporary space in an underground concourse of
the Rockefeller Center, at 14West Forty-Ninth Street. There, at the last possible mo
staff and set about hang
ment, Evans rejected the installation ideas of theMuseum's
ing his prints himself, showing some with mats, in frames, under glass, others matted
but mounted under glass without frames, and still others mounted on cardboard
cropped to the edges and glued directly on the wall. There were also great discrepan
cies
in print
size:
some
were
overscale,
others
small;
comparatively
occasionally
they were hung two or three deep, but always on or around a continuous horizontal
line that gave continuity to the erratic clustering of thematically related images with
out softening the sudden contrasts of format and presentation.
In a letter to Evans dated 27 September 1938, Beaumont Newhall called the in
stallation "exacting," "simple and straightforward?and
daring" (qtd. in Mellow
was
an
to
it
there
about
attitude of preciousness.
388). Certainly,
suggest
nothing
Evans did not fetishize his negatives or prints. In later life, he said: "I would cut any
number of inches off my frames in order to get a better picture" (qtd. inKatz 86). His
was
not
as
minimalism,
pristine
it has
appeared.
retrospectively
We
must
be
care
ful, therefore, about what we deduce from the luxurious austerity of American Pho
tographs. Yet its spare lines still marked a tension. On the one hand, the design of the
book constructed an ideal, Evans might have said "pure," space under the shelter of
theMuseum. Here, it is hard to avoid seeing at work the bad faith that allowed Evans
to designate theMuseum a non-site from which he could then declaim the freedom
of his work from contamination by the aesthetic or political policies of any of insti
tution.99
On
the other
the
hand,
sparseness
of his
book
was
also
the product
of
an ac
tive negation. Just as the photographs

themselves
emerged through what they
so
the
book
defined
itself
what
it
excluded.
Tom Mabry was quick to
precluded,
by
wrote
to
Evans's
and
Lincoln
Kirstein
when
that,
grasp
strategy
writing his essay for
the book: "I should think that you might want to define as simply and clearly as pos
sible the difference between Walker's work and the majority of photographers both
"
'documentary'
and
'lyric'
In particular,
a line
had
to be
drawn
between
Evans's
vi
that documentary photography has

sion and "the canonization of the commonplace
turned into" (Mabry to Kirstein, 29 April 1938; qtd. inMellow 368). Mabry's exam
and many of those
Life's photographers,
ples here were Margaret Bourke-White,
who worked for the Federal Art Project.
American
Photographs
was
therefore,
in part,
Evans's
corrective
to the photo
Land of the Free.

journalism of Life and a judgment on books such as MacLeish's
came
on
out
27
when
the
book
Ironically, however,
September 1938, itwas the poet
who had the first, if not the last, word. Sealing the book was a contrasting yellow
40
John Tagg
paper bookband quoting a testimony from Macleish,

saying: "Walker Evans' re
markable work suggests that great photography may translate objects into meaning.
These American photographs are not Sandburg?no
they
photographs could be?but
do much more than record one area of American experience. They make it speak"
folder #21). Translating ob
1994.250.57,
(Evans Archive, American Photographs,
jects into meaning. This, of course, was the problem: the problem of meaning. But it
ismeaning that seems to be strangely withheld in Evans's work.
Here is that street in Atlanta again, now titled "Houses and Billboards
in At
lanta, 1936." It occurs as plate 47 in the first part of the book, which Kirstein advised
"
and in which, he said, "we have an as
"might be labeled 'People by Photography'
pect of America for which itwould be difficult to claim too much" (198). The Atlanta
photograph comes after "People in Summer, New York State Town, 1930" and
"Birmingham Boarding House, 1936," which also appeared in Land of the Free. It is
followed by two photographs of "South Street, New York" from 1932 that Evans dis
tinguished as "Trio" and "Close up, unbuttoned" (Evans Archive, American Pho
folder #1).100 The last picture in the sequence, closing Part
tographs, 1994.250.57,
One, is "Louisiana Plantation House, 1935." Then come the titles. The reader should
know from the dust cover and from the concluding paragraph of Kirstein's essay that
"The photographs are arranged to be seen in their given sequence." The difficulty is
in saying what the sequence discloses (Figs. 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19).
The houses with their balconies overlooking
the street follow images of life
around the doorstep and on the porch, ambiguous spaces between sidewalk and inte
rior where the public and private meet and become confused. Then comes the col
lapse of the private onto the street: the homeless men in lower Manhattan reading,
sitting, and sleeping on cardboard on shallow workshop steps. And finally, the col
lapse of an entire social world: the decayed plantation house and the massive fallen
shade tree, "cumulative emblem" of "a doomed civilization" Alan Trachtenberg calls
it,101rhyming with the prostrate bulk of the sleeping vagrant who fills his niche like a
tomb figure, his flies undone. It is a somber procession, building to an emotional
crescendo.
Yet,
at
the
same
time,
following
a sequence
of
four
telescopically
com
pressed frontal images, the space in the view of the plantation house and dead tree
tilts and pulls back, letting us see sky and sunlight. The didacticism of the sequence
and the weight of visual metaphor are tempered, just as the pace with which image
follows image is likely to be changed by the fact that we get distracted by small
numbers, inscriptions, litter, stains, architectural details and mold
things?signs,
and
carved
chalked graffiti, typography, words: "LB LOVES," "Furnished
ings,
Rooms,"
"VODVIL,"
"SWIM."
Despite Kirstein's advocacy for the Hegelian dialectic and his vision of an "or
dained design" in the "poetry of contrast" in and across Evans's pictures, it is not be
yond all doubt that we are following a narrative here (195, 193). Nor is it entirely
certain that we are looking at "records of the age before an imminent collapse": pic
tures that testify "to the symptoms of waste and selfishness that caused the ruin," but
that "salvage whatever was splendid for the future reference of the survivors" (196).
Evans, it has to be said, liked what Kirstein wrote.102 Frances Collins, too, found the
contrast between what is and what could be "one of the most shattering things in the
Fig. 14.Walker Evans, American

(New York: Museum
Photographs
Fig. 15.Walker Evans, American

(New York: Museum
Photographs
Fig.
16. Walker
Evans,
American
Photographs
(New York: Museum
of Modern
Art,
1938), plate 47.
Fig.
17.Walker
Evans, American
Photographs
(New York: Museum
of Modern
Art,
1938),
plate 48.
Fig.
18.Walker
Evans, American
Photographs
(New York: Museum
of Modern
Art,
1938),
plate 49.
Fig.
19.Walker
Evans, American
Photographs
(New York: Museum
of Modern
Art,
1938),
plate 50.
44
John Tagg
book": "it's insisted on: you're not allowed to forget it for a minute" ("F" [Frances
1994.250.57,
Collins] to Evans, 4 May 1938, Evans Archive, American Photographs,
reviewers all the way up to Eleanor Roosevelt
also
folder #29). Contemporary
seemed to agree there was a message here.103 Edward Alden Jewell in the New York
Times saw "a true portrait of America" (9). The 15 October 1938 Washington Daily
News, reproducing "Houses and Billboards, Atlanta" under the headline "This, Our
Native Land: America, The Beautiful," called Evans's book "our truest composite
portrait of the face of this country." In the Sunday New YorkHerald Tribune Carl Van
Vechten declared that "if all America except Evans' photographs were razed they
reviewer David Wolff was cut by "the
would tell our story" (4). The New Masses
merciless edge of truth" in Evans's photographs, "by a combination of reticence, del
icacy and a bitter surgical honesty" that set Evans's work against those commercial
photographers on assignment for Life who have "corrupted our taste into a desire for
echoing
hasty titillation" (n.p.). And in The New Republic, William Carlos Williams,
fellow poet MacLeish,
declared: "The pictures talk to us. And they say plenty" (282).
There is a sense in all the reviews of Kirstein's essay and Mabry's publicity ma
terials being to hand, as a necessary crib. But the orchestration of Evans's reception
did not always work. The 7 October 1938 Washington Post saw "a parade of dreary,
drab and depressing scenes." The 17 December
1938 San Francisco News thought
Evans's book "unnecessary and cruel." The New York Times Book Review critic
of a nation" (Kirstein 198) and
looked at what Kirstein hailed as "the physiognomy
saw "bumps, warts, boils, and blackheads" (Williamson 6). Privately, the photogra
that "Walker Evans'
pher Ansel Adams was apoplectic, writing to Edward Weston
book gave me a hernia" (qtd. in Rathbone 166), and to Georgia O'Keefe that it was
"atrocious":
social
"mixed
meaning,
documentation,
esthetics,
(emo
sophistication
tional slumming), etc." (qtd. inMellow

381). Pare Lorentz, typically, felt that the
"should
have
been
captioned" (6). Even the reviewers who did not choke on
pictures
Kirstein's vision of the book as a "monument to our moment" found it less easy to
say what precisely itwas that Evans's book said when it spoke (193). As Tom Mabry,
to clarify
thinking
matters,
wrote
in Harper's
Bazaar.
one
"Perhaps
to Evans's
clue
work is that his photographs are not symbols for something else; they are what they
mean" (84). Itwas a typically skillful negotiation on Evans's behalf but, beyond the
negation, it offered only tautology.
The critics' solution to this dilemma was tomimic the book. In place of a para
message,
phrased
slum,
a row
of
what
we
ramshackle
is a catalogue:
a small
town
huts,
get
"a mass
main
of motor
street
derelicts,
eye-sore,
a cluttered
the grimace
of
jig-saw boarding house in ruins" (Jewell 9); "two sullen boys with 'sez-you' expres
sions, amoronic youth and his girl in a parked roadster, andMr. Evans's row of drab,
depressing houses, as well as his squalid interiors" (Williamson 6); or, more sympa
thetically: "the used cars abandoned on a field; a confused and helpless back room,
revealed through an open door; the tires, tubes and spare parts displayed on the front
of a garage; and the magic advertising words, the names, the signs, ubiquitous, ugly,
and powerful" (Wolff n.p.). This is what, in a memorable phrase, the
meaningless,
leftist critic David Wolff
life."
The
miscellaneous,
called "a certain hideous miscellaneousness

however,
has
no
general
category.
It can
of American
only
be
enumer
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
45
ated, inventoried, logged on a list: a "list that has been prepared," asWilliam Carlos
Williams
remarked of American Photographs
(282), but a list nonetheless.
Evans was an inveterate listmaker. In 1934, characteristically drafting an unfin
ished letter to Ernestine Evans, then an editor at Lippincott, about his ideas for pho
keeping
Evans
books,"
"picture
tographic
city
is what
I'm
after
. . .
things typical."
all
People,
classes,
Automobiles
Architecture,
street
surrounded
bunches
by
and the automobile

American
atmosphere,
urban
the
ture, bad education,

The
"American
confided:
street
religion
of
the new
down-and-out.
landscape.
taste,
smell,
commerce,
small
scale,
the hateful
stuff,
women's
large
the city
scale,
clubs,
fake
cul
in decay.
movies.
Evidence of what the people of the city read, eat, see for amusement,
laxation and do not get it.
do for re
Sex.
Advertising
A lot else, you see what Imean.
(qtd. inWalker Evans At Work 98)104
well before Roy Stryker's "shooting scripts" for his imagined "pictorial en
cyclopedia of American agriculture," Evans's list is a manifesto for American Pho
stuff," misogyny,
smell, "hateful
decay, movies,
tographs}05 Architecture,
a
street view of
it
is
of
the
also
sex,
frustration,
advertising:
provisional inventory
Written
houses and billboards inAtlanta.

Four years later, gathering his thoughts for the rushed exhibition and publica
tion with theMuseum of Modern Art, Evans would be writing lists again, jotting the
columns down hastily on odd sheets of paper:
Rivera
Paintings
Architecture
Housing
Slums
Greek Revival Architecture
Portraits
People
Shops
Street
New York
New Orleans
Cuba
Americana
Victorian Architecture
Interiors
Abstract.
46
John Tagg
SHOW IDEAS
small defined
sections
people
faces
architecture
repetitions
small pictures
(Evans Archive, American
large pictures.
and 5)106
Photographs,
1994.250.57,
folders #4
Lists of subjects, lists of categories, lists of possible titles, lists of prints needed from
Later, there will be lists of invitees, lists of those to receive exhibition
Washington.
notices or complimentary
copies of the book, lists of the final titles. Lists are not
they are free from the demands of structure, coherence, and grammatical
agreement that made writing for Evans such a painful process of drafting, erasure,
interpolation, and revision. The list is epigraphic. It does not need to be expanded or
explained. It has sequence but without finality, at least potentially retaining its mo
bility. The list asks to be rearranged. Like the file, it is open to reordering, insertions,
prose:
recategorization, and regrouping. The list allowed Evans to handle ideas inwords the
the postcards he collected from the age of ten and
way he handled his negatives?or
with
card
dividers: "Flatiron," "State Capitols," "Summer
methodically
organized
Hotels,"
"Persons,"
"Factories,"
"Street
"Automobiles,"
Scenes."107
The list is the genre of the collector. Categories can be shuffled and reconfig
ured like postcards in a shoebox. For Evans, as for Roland Barthes, the pleasure of
this sorting and resorting pointed to a solution to the problem of making a book, in
that al
whose rigid form the binding sequence might be undone by a provisionality
lowed
the
reader
to
imagine
the
book
unmade
and
remade
again.
American
Pho
tographs retains the feel of having been made in this way, in spite of Lincoln
Kirstein's theories and his help in untying the knots and getting it right.108 Kirstein
saw the photographic book on the model of film, in which he believed Evans might
"achieve
his
ultimate
lyricism,"
though,
in several
actual
attempts,
this
never
proved
the case (196).109 The structure of film, for Kirstein, was in turn determined by mon
tage, "elevating the casual, the everyday and the literal into specific, permanent sym
bols" (196-97),
just as the contrast of opposites in Evans's photographs, "looked at
in sequence" (193), could be seen to "elevate fortuitous accidents of juxtaposition
into ordained design," turning "accidental conjunctions" into "serious symbols allied
in disparate chaos" (195-96). This is Kirstein's view. The model of the list and the
less committed to narrative convergence and
card file index opens other possibilities,
the cumulative symbolic effect of juxtapositions. American Photographs belongs to
such amodel, "arranged and divided and ordered" by Evans, as part of the collector's
compulsion and unending pleasure. Perhaps that is why attempts, at the time and
since,
to literalize
a narrative
in the
sequence
have
always
seemed
overwrought.110
The list, like the file, evokes the archive?another

series into which the photo
graph might be inserted, quite different from the book and the film. Yet, the list dif
fers from the archive in that it does not demand consistency. Its typologies are not
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
47
bound to follow a general rule. The list is the archive without the law and without the
public function.111 And it was the civic function that Evans balked at. Nevertheless,
we cannot neglect the fact that a complicated relation to the archive hung over all of
Evans's photographic work. Indeed, as Roy Stryker was not prepared to forget,
"about half of the photographs" in American Photographs were "from negatives in
the Department of Agriculture files" (Stryker toMrs. L. A. Collins, Jr., 19 October
1994.250.57, folder #41). Or, as Pare
1938, Evans Archive, American Photographs,
Lorentz chose to put it in print, "almost half were taken at the instigation of Profes
sor Stryker of the Farm Security Administration
and were paid for by the U.S. Gov
ernment" (6).
In actually preparing the plates for the book, Evans seems to have had his own
prints to work from, since he wrote to Stryker more than once that he did not have
time to come toWashington.112 Tom Mabry also turned down Stryker's offer of help
with printing, telling him that the publication schedule made it necessary to use the
prints that Evans already had in New York (Mabry to Stryker, 20 June 1938, Evans
1994.250.57, folder #36).113 On the other hand, a
Archive, American Photographs,
in
Evans's
hand,
one-page manuscript
apparently from this time, contains a list of
numbers bracketed together as "flood leica shots of mine, want prints," and a list of ti
tles also seeming to describe prints Evans needed from the file (Evans Archive, Mis
folder #17).114 The list includes
Notes
1994.250.57,
1920s-1930s,
"Atlanta billboards," indicating how Evans remembered the image and suggesting he
needed at least an additional print as he began to prepare his work for theMuseum.
cellaneous
Perhaps this explains why, as time ran out, the photograph

not in the exhibition.
Whatever
the circumstance,
the negative?or
appeared in the book but
negatives?remained
inWashing
they had quite another place in the system of the file. Here, mounted on
eleven-by-fourteen-inch
blue-gray board and filed between thick, color-coded card
from
Evans's
the
dividers,
plate fell under "E," the South-East Region, where it
print
was further classified as belonging not to "Streets," nor to the category "2563 Aban
doned Buildings" or "631 Advertising," but to "213 Buildings," under the broader
class "2 CITIES," itself part of "2-278 Cities and towns?as background" (Fig. 20).
We should remember, of course, that this geographical and subject-based system was
ton, where
a later solution to the problem of storage and retrieval of somewhere around 107,000
photographs; though the place of the print in the "classified file" tells us not a little
about the priorities of one, near-contemporary
reading of Evans's photograph. The
under
which
classification
Evans's
image was subsumed was de
systematic subject
after
his
Paul
Vanderbilt
hiring by Stryker in 1942.115 Earlier, prints
veloped by
only
and negatives seem to have been filed state by state, according to assignment, in the
on location, following
the dozens of
sequences developed by the photographers
shooting scripts and hundreds of memos sent to them by Roy Stryker outlining the
matic directions for their work in the field. This story-driven arrangement allowed
for Stryker's larger ambition to compile a "pictorial encyclopaedia" of a passing way
of American
life, while simultaneously
catering to the outlook of newspaper and
magazine editors whose cooperation was needed if the publicity needs of the New
Deal agency were
to be fulfilled
in "bringing the facts before the public"
in order to
48
John Tagg
recruit their consent (Stryker Papers, NDA 4).116 Even so, Styker's didactic concern
with the series did not easily survive picture editors' concern to find individual im
ages to fit a given layout style and story line.
To what series Evans's Atlanta image might be allotted is precisely the problem.
the files, Paul Vanderbilt took the view that Evans's work "was never
Reorganizing
divorced
from an instinctive cynicism or even the hatreds inherent in his per
quite
sonal philosophy" and thus did not fit the agency's programs (12). Stryker would not
have gone so far, though he knew that Evans had little respect for his instructions. In
any case, the "nice big order" Stryker sent to Evans "on the ground" in Vicksburg,
in February 1936 does not mention Atlanta (Stryker to Evans, February
Mississippi,
1936, Stryker Papers, NDA 25)."7 Neither does Evans's earlier "Outline Memoran
dum" for his projected eight-week automobile trip to the states of the southeast. This
only says: "Cross Georgia and Alabama, rural subjects" (Stryker Papers, NDA 25).
We have, of course, the file caption, typewritten, cut out, and pasted on the mounting
card. It reads: "Atlanta, Ga. Mar 1936. Frame houses and a billboard. LC-USF-342
8057-A. Walker Evans." The back of the card is marked "Resettlement Administra
"E 213" and the lot number 1538. The
tion" and stamped with the classification
stamps are Vanderbilt's later additions. The title, different from that in Land of the
Free and different from others Evans would ascribe, is hardly accurate as a descrip
tion, even if it does go back to 1936; though, again, it suggests what itwas thought
important to see, in short, what at the time the picture was presumed to be about.
On
the
surface,
this was
not
a mystery.
As
we
have
seen,
the picture
was
promi
nent enough in the file for Stryker to pull it for MacLeish's

book, just as Evans was
to include it in the book version of American Photographs. The print had also been
memorized by John Vachon, who joined the Historical Section in the summer of
1936 as "assistant messenger" and general helper but soon became the primary cus
todian of the picture file. Though not officially classified as a photographer until
1941, Vachon was allowed by Stryker, after 1937, to take on a limited number of
The Melancholy
Realism of Walker Evans
49
field assignments. His photographic education had been the file and he later con
fessed to walking around "looking forWalker Evans' pictures" (qtd. inHurley 156).
to Stryker: "There are 4 Walker
From Dubuque,
Iowa, he wrote enthusiastically
Evans type RR Stations in town" (Vachon to Stryker, from the Hotel Canfield,
Dubuque, Iowa, 19April [1940?!, Stryker Papers, NDA 26). And, in 1938, passing
through Atlanta, where he knew so well a certain house Evans had photographed, he
recalled: "I walked all over town looking for it, and when I had found the real thing,
. . . itwas like a historic find"
(qtd. in Hurley 156).118Vachon's image, too, a dupli
cate of a duplicate, joined the file, under the same classification,
though now cap
1938. Houses and advertisements."119 The homage is
tioned: "Atlanta, Ga. May
instructive, especially to a man who had been fired. Clearly it also says much about
in its own terms.
the power of Evans's work to make over the world as photogenic
The act of replication is telling, too, driven as itmay have been by something pro
voking in this particular photograph. But the doubling of the image in the file is also
uncanny (Fig. 21).
What Vachon's reproduction brings out is that, in a sense, the file is filled with
is a veritable
duplicates. This was itself an Evans theme and, indeed, duplication
mania in the picture that fascinated Vachon: two houses, duplicates without an origi
nal, two balconies, two billboards, two eyes, two eyes twice over, doubled doubles,
duplicated in the posters duplicated by the photographic negative and again by the
print that is duplicated by Vachon. Vachon's return to the scene confirms only that it
is not there. This place inAtlanta, the site that had to be visited and revisited but that
is now gone, was already a site of duplication?a
duplication that, in turn, incited a
gesture that set off a chain implicating the very internal processes of photographic
meaning in and after the act of exposure with the camera, so that Evans's image be
comes, in a certain light, a photograph about a relation to photography as a process
in repetition without a source (cf.
of duplication, and to meaning as postponement
Owens 85-86, 88).
This is not to suggest that Evans's picture was puzzling to a degree that excited
concern or critical comment. InCongress and in the press, other images from the file
"Atlanta,
Fig. 21. John Vachon,
and Ad
1938. Houses
Ga. May
of
vertisements."
Department
Resettlement
Agriculture,
ministration/Farm
Security
ministration
Photographs
Ad
Ad
file card. (Prints and

Division,
Library of
Congress.)
50
John Tagg
would be held aloft as proof of the dangers of government run amok, wasting public
money, interfering where it ought not be concerned, engaging in absurdities to jus
tify a gross and parasitic bureaucracy. "Love Before Breakfast" did not arouse such
passions. This does little, however, to allay the uncertainty of the image or to resolve
what use itmight have had in a government agency file. Perhaps we can make more
headway
starting
elsewhere.
The photograph was made in Atlanta on Friday, 20 March 1936, somewhere

near the city's business district, probably within a few blocks' walk of the Kimball
House, the landmark hotel where Evans and his unofficial assistant, Peter Sekaer,
were staying.120When Evans arrived inAtlanta on the twelfth, he was working his
way back from New Orleans, on the second leg of a long trip through the South for
the Historical Section that had begun on 24 November
1935.121After recall toWash
on
sent
11
Evans
had
been
south
1936,
ington
January
again by Stryker on Saturday,
8 February to pick up his car in Gulfport, Mississippi,
then head down the coast to
New Orleans and on northward to Vicksburg, Mississippi,
the old Confederate
once
eastern
western
the
that
held
and
territories
of the Confeder
together
lynch-pin
acy. After dropping out of sight here for more than two weeks, Evans had been once
again rousted up by Stryker to head north to Tupelo, for an emergency publicity job,
then back south and east to Birmingham, Alabama, and on eastward via Atlanta to
and for St. Marys at the southeastern
Monticello,
Georgia, en route forWaycross
most corner of the state. From here, Evans was to begin the return trip up the coast to
Savannah, then on through South Carolina toWashington, D. C, via Virginia but cut
ting out a planned excursion toWest Virginia.122
Evans was known to abhor the agency jobs that Stryker's long lists of instruc
tions pressed on him. He had no more sympathy for the increased levels of produc
tion Stryker urged him to meet by shooting more rolls of film with his Leica.
after Vicksburg, Evans largely stuck to his task, following both the
Nevertheless,
the
and
itinerary
assignment schedule Stryker had laid out for him. The route toAt
lanta led on from the industrial landscapes of Birmingham. Evans and Sekaer arrived
on the twelfth, a Thursday, but Evans had to catch a plane back to Birmingham on 14
March
to meet
Ernestine
Evans
and
complete
certain
routine
assignments.
It is not
clear that Ernestine Evans ever turned up in time.123 In any case, Evans was back in
Atlanta by the sixteenth, staying until 21 March, when he left by car forMonticello.
On the day before he departed, he made this photograph, on the date, in fact, that ap
pears on the billboard itself, the shutter opening exactly as prescribed.
Earlier in the city, Evans and Sekaer had set about photographing
segregated
African American housing, as they had in New Orleans, Vicksburg, and Tupelo. In
Atlanta, Evans recorded the dilapidated wooden row houses with their ramshackle
fenced yards that lined the dirt alleys leading off the city roads, behind the homes of
white people (Fig. 22). But he also pictured life on the porch and the interior of a
thriving black barber's shop, moving the barbers out of the frame of his view camera
and taking care not to include the customers who appear in Sekaer's small-format
shot.124 Evans also found other things to his liking in the area: the Cherokee Parts
Store and Garage on Marietta Street, around the corner from his hotel; E. J. Foy
Used Tires, with its display of elaborate painted spare-tire covers and his own self
The Melancholy
Realism of Walker Evans
51
portrait reflected in the workshop window; a painted butcher's sign, like the one that
had attracted his attention inMississippi
earlier the same month; and the gesturing
statue of Populist Senator Thomas E. Watson,
in front of the columns of the State
Capitol Building.125
Atlanta was the largest city inwhich Evans would work on this entire sweep of
the South. Yet, judging by the small number of negatives produced during his eight
day stay, it seemed to offer him relatively little of what he was seeking. Evans had
been inAtlanta once before, in February of the previous year, on his way through
Georgia from Savannah, traveling with Gifford Cochran and his butler, James, on a
commission from Cochran to photograph Greek Revival architecture in the South.
He did not then make any known photographs in the city, though this was under
standable given his particular interests on that trip. Atlanta had suffered badly in
in
1864, in Sherman's last campaign of the Civil War, as presidential electioneering
flamed demands for speedy results. Bombardments of the city and the siege of Con
federate fortifications from July to August had left Atlanta almost in ruins. Of the
retreat, were de
buildings that remained, most were blown up in the Confederate
molished by Union army engineers laying out new defenses, or were burned and
blasted by Sherman's army as it pressed on from Atlanta to the sea. Evans was fa
The WPA Guide To Its Towns And Countryside

Fig. 22. Georgia:
lower left.
Walker Evans photograph,
"Negro Section, Atlanta,"
(Athens: University
of Georgia
Press,
1940), n. p.
John Tagg
52
miliar with
this history from his acquisition of the ten volumes of Francis Trevelyan
Photographic History of the Civil War, which served him as a model of an
"photographic evidence" and mapped out an iconography of the southern
Miller's
elegiac
fallen
town,
into
In Sherman's
ruins.126
was
there
wake,
little
an
of
architecture
ear
lier period thatmight interest Evans in the Georgia capital. Little of theVictorian era,
too, at least in the downtown area around Five Points, the new hub northwest of the
old city center that was now boxed in by concrete and steel office blocks. As the
state guide conceded, unlike most southern cities, Atlanta had "no old houses
and few old families"; the railroad-driven boom that had begun under Reconstruc
tion had left Atlanta "few classic Columns but many smokestacks" (160).
Then Evans came across these two artisanal houses, if that is in fact what he
saw first. The age of the buildings would have attracted him, as well as their varia
WPA
on
tions
a common
pattern-book
The
style.
of
juxtaposition
vernacular
and
houses
billboards was also something Evans had attuned himself to notice; it

mass-produced
was one of his trademark finds. InNew Orleans, earlier on his trip, he had stopped to
photograph a black family house in the Greek Revival style next to a poster advertis
ing Heinz tomato ketchup. At a later date, on the outskirts of the factory district, he
had carefully framed a billboard against a scruffy industrial background so that all
one sees is "Defective Vision."127 There were also other billboards and movie posters
and Alabama.128 So, here in
along the way from New Orleans through Mississippi
set
he
his
and
Deardorf
camera, probably on the side
Atlanta,
up
tripod
eight-by-ten
of the street as the picture invites us to think, and
filter, at f/22 for one twenty-fifth of a second; the
walk opposite, if not in the middle

two exposures: one, without
made
second,
again
duplicated
"20th";
movie
without
same
and movie
but
aperture
"Photographer's
"houses
"Atlanta";
at the
filter,
form headed
Record
posters
for one-tenth
of Legends,"
before
('Love
of
Evans
a second.
On
jotted down:
the
So
breakfast')."129
title did catch his eye. The photograph itself, however, takes more reading.
The flat light and dense print make this a day of breathless grayness, without
shadow
and
un warmed
the
by
sun.
The
conditions,
however,
served
certain
ends
where making the picture was concerned. Flat light makes a flat space that seems so
evident, at first, but turns out to be troublingly unreadable. The space of the street is
already odd enough. The steps from the sidewalk lead nowhere. They no longer ac
cess the houses behind because they have been boarded up in a way that also pro
vides the opportunity
advertisements
for the posting of billboards,
onto
the wooden
planks
above
the
and the quite recently pasting of

brick-and-stone
two-tiered
walls.
this means that the houses themselves are boarded up, too, is not at all easy
to tell. There seem to be signs of life on the balcony to the left and there are curtains
at the window. Compared to what Evans shows us elsewhere at this time inAtlanta,
in the back alleys south of Decatur Street, these houses seem inhabitable enough.
They do not seem to be scheduled for demolition, as so many others in the downtown
Whether
area
were,
"to make
way
for
apartments,
filling
stations,
chain
stores,
and
open-air
162). Certainly, as we know from John Vachon's

eating places" (WPA, Georgia
reenactment of Evans's photograph,
they will still be standing two years hence,
much the same, though Chatterbox and Love Before Breakfast will have given place
to Kentucky Moonshine
and The Count ofMontecristo.130
The Melancholy
are lived in, however,
If the houses
at least,
we
are
none.
shown
there would
of our
Because
Realism
of Walker Evans
seem to be no means
viewpoint,
we
also
cannot
be
53
of entry;
sure
of
the
depth of the buildings or of what lies beyond. The height of the fence blocks our
view and cuts off any horizon. How far it is to the blocklike building or the chimney
to the
stack
right
a matter
remains
of
these
Moreover,
conjecture.
puzzling
arrange
ments are made no more legible by what is done with the camera. A hasty scanning
sees the billboards in front and the houses behind, the reverse of the relation of food
line to billboard that presented Margaret Bourke-White with her "ironical" juxtapo
sition.
boards
walls?
where
make
But how much space, if any, is there between the temporary-looking

bill
and the house fronts? How far do the porches project from the buildings'
How deep are the steps from the sidewalk? How much of a ledge is there
the first wall creates a platform for the second? Any calculations we might
are fraught by the compressing
effect of the telephoto lens, no doubt the
longest of the two components of the Zeiss Protar triple convertible lens that Evans
used with the Deardorff view camera, giving an angle of vision markedly narrower
than the forty-five degrees that are taken as "normal."131Recourse to his longest focal
length lens typified Evans's
large-format work at this time. It was a deliberate
choice. As Jerry Thompson has remarked, the world to which Evans's lens opens is a
particular world: "The world compacted, held at arm's length, flattened to be read
like a page of literature, full of irony and delicate meaning" (12).
The choice of lens, the corrective adjustments: these things overcoded the entire
surface of the image, as it once appeared, upside down, on the ground glass screen
before
Evans's
eyes.
At
the
same
certain
time,
contrivances
of
composition
have
also
made our task all the harder. The difficulties seem to reach a pitch along certain con
founding rift lines. Take the utility pole, which just happens to be there, but which,
like the factory chimney, comes in handy as a device, holding in place the grid on
which
the photographic frame is built. The pole, however, proves rather slippery?at
least as slippery as the word "frame" in the previous sentence. If you follow the pole
up with your eye, it begins, on its left-hand side, to duplicate the edge of the Carole
Lombard poster, already emphasized by what seems to be a graphic line that has,
however, no parallel on the left. The pole, here, does not quite coincide with the
poster
edge:
there
is an uncertain
and
gap,
as one moves
up, more
parallel
lines
ap
pear to the left that seem to denote wood planking?the

planking, perhaps, of the
billboard support itself. But, if one follows the top edge of this planking left, it dis
appears behind the capital of a square wooden pillar supporting the house porch. It
does
so, moreover,
at
around
the
point
that
diagonally
attached
piece
of wood
passes infront of the pillar, intersecting the boarding on which the poster ismounted.
Whether
this piece of wood actually touches the entablature of the porch or the
say, it touched them
planking proves surprisingly difficult to determine. If it did?if,
both?then
that would mean that the billboards were not some unspecified distance
in front of the houses, but were battened to the pillars of the porches?pillars
that, if
we could only see them, would be grounded on the brick plinth, so that the houses
would rise directly from the street, without any set-back, at least until that cut-out
corner
on
the right-hand
house
This surprising conclusion
front
veers
away.
seems to be confirmed by the fact that the feet of the
54
John Tagg
pillars do, indeed, appear to break through the tattered lower edges of the posters,
which
were
still
relatively
new,
remember.
Even
so,
a consistent
correspondence
be
tween protruding base and requisite pillar is not always to be found. One extra base
unfortunately appears in the middle of the billboard on the left. This is worrying, but
already enough has been done to unsettle that initial assessment of the space in
which the houses form a backdrop. The billboards and facades no longer have a fore
relation, and this is a change that does not leave the question of
ground-background
meaning in the picture untouched. From this point of view, the new proposal is rather
unwelcome,
though there does not seem to be sufficient evidence to settle it ab
solutely at this point. Let us try the pole's other side.
The right edge, as it appears, threatens to lead us into even greater difficulties.
Where
it crosses the upper brick wall, we enter a very uncertain zone. Perhaps the
vertical post that the pole now seems to abut is seated on brickwork that is not a low
wall but rather the foundation of the porch. The pole, however, gets in the way of set
tling this matter with any certainty. Moving up, to escape this problem, we find the
edge of the pole begins to echo a series of four vertical lines that parallel but run be
yond a further series to the right, where the intervals are larger and where surely we
are dealing with the planking that provides the posters' support. The more closely
packed lines, by contrast, seem to describe the edge and vertical grooving of a
squared porch pillar, as becomes somewhat clearer further up. But how the pillar so
neatly fills the available slot in the fence, where exactly one runs into the other, and
in what plane pillar, plank, and post may be said to lie are all questions that remain
hard to answer with any sense of definitiveness. And the further up we go, the more
likely we are to be set off at right angles, with the result that we have to worry about
the conjunctions of capital and board, window and fencing, shadow and stain, poster
and porch roof.
The whole matter is disturbingly undecidable, and since the relation of posters
to houses has been taken by critics to be the crux of meaning in the photograph, we
seem to be in larger trouble. It is as if we were at one of those junctions in a text
de Man says, the cognitive and the performative
functions do not flow
a
common
into
each
the
lines
of
other, along
grammar, but disconnect
smoothly
a
threshold
of
without
earlier
along
unreadability,
erasing
readings, but without
cum
to
able
resolve
them
either
The
(299-300).
being
pole
compositional device has
us
we can no longer be
but
And
trouble.
doubt
is
Now
brought
nothing
contagious.
certain about that object nearest to us, joined to our space by a wayward line. It is an
where,
object that might stand for the place of the camera or of the viewer reiterated in the
space of the picture, in the street. Is it, by its placement on the sidewalk, a severed
trash can? Or is it an upturned tin bath, having lost its bottom; the inverted double of
the one on the left-hand balcony whose bottom, alas, we cannot see? But, what
a bath be doing in the street?What would it say for domestic life in the houses
beyond? And what sort of figure can it cut for the viewer now?
These are peculiarly enervating questions. They take us rather far from the fe
licitous decodings we have been offered. In contrast to Bourke-White's
Louisville
would
image, in Evans's photograph it proves surprisingly difficult to settle with any cer
tainty the exact spatial relation of billboards and houses. Even at this level, it is not at
The Melancholy
all clear that they are physically

uisite
for
some
broader
Realism
of Walker Evans
55
separated or can be visually held apart as a prereq

and
separation
contrast,
say,
of
the world
of
representation
and its refutation in the real. An additional problem, here, would be that the buildings
themselves
or
at
spatial
least
are part
constitute
articulations,
of
an architectural
a vernacular
decorative
discourse,
language,
emblems,
are
representations,
one
of pattern-book
architectural
as
and so on. As
"homes,"
public
might
say,
elements,
represen
tations of domestic
life, the private domain, or individual taste?representations
elaborated in conventional rituals of practice and use?the
buildings further enmesh
us in a text that the photograph does not effectively
equip us to unravel. As
houses blind and deaf to the comedy they enact against the se
metaphors?"sullen
ductive billboards they cannot see" (Trachtenberg, "A Book" 265); "aging houses
. . . themselves become
plastered with ads for a pair of coming attractions
'painted"
"
'The Cruel Radiance'
ladies,' unwitting victims of the Depression"
(Rosenheim,
take us even further, if we are prepared to follow the critics.132 Represen
83)?they
tations and representations of representations. But what of the world with which the
are to be contrasted? What of the posters? Surely, here, we are dealing with
things reliably held in place, framed for us to see, here on this street inAtlanta?and
simultaneously on thousands of other streets across America?
The printed billboards already mark a tear in the presupposed unities of photo
houses
graphic place and time. On the left is an advertisement for Chatterbox, an RKO
Radio production, directed by George Nichols,
Jr., and based on a play by David
Carb, in which a naive, stage-struck chatterbox, Jenny Yates from rural Vermont,
played by Anne Shirley, runs away from her grandfather's farm and is discovered by
a cynical producer (Eric Rhodes) who casts her as Alice Murgatroyd
in a parody
revival
and
the
of
"Virtue's
Reward"?the
very play
very part in which
Broadway
now
name
on
deceased
mother
had
made
her
the
Jenny's
stage.133 Even as knowing
a
the
and
dreams
kitsch,
play proves
Jenny's
collapse; though, in her disappoint
flop
she finds unexpected consolation in handsome, aspiring artist, Philip Greene
(played by Phillips Holmes), who is charmed by her innocence and has come to love
her as she really is. Not quite up to the standards of its Restoration prototypes, Chat
terbox is, then, the story of an ing?nue, up from the country and at the mercy of the
venal city. The poster shows Anne Shirley, formerly known as Dawn O'Day, who
changed her name after playing the lead in the 1934 film of Anne of Green Gables.
Anne Shirley is seen as Jenny Yates playing the role of Alice Murgatroyd?all
of
ment,
these names fictitious, referencing only the layering of representations. Rather in

congruously, behind the couch on which the actresses sit are the lights of Broadway,
evoking Evans's New York here on an unknown street in downtown Atlanta, but also
an untypical "New Vision" composite image that
citing "Broadway Composition,"
Evans published a number of times between 1930 and 1931, notably on the cover of
the 24 June 1931 issue of Advertising and Selling (Fig. 23).
Next to Chatterbox, starting today all across America, is Love Before Breakfast,
a 1936 Universal production, directed by Walter Lang, from a book by Faith Baldwin
with the rather less promising title of Spinster Dinner.134 The film is a pioneer screw
ball comedy, worked on uncredited by Preston Sturges, inwhich, in the year she was
nominated for an Oscar, Hollywood's
highest paid actress, Carole Lombard, is the
56
John Tagg
Fig. 23. Walker
Evans,
"Broadway
Composition,"
1930.
center of cinematic attention as a fey and fickle Park Avenue beauty, Kay Colby, who
is unable to decide between
the dubious attractions of Cesar Romero as Bill
Wadsworth and rich oil tycoon Scott Miller, played by Preston Foster. The black eye
is what everyone sees. Kay gets it in reel two, in a night club fight, from a punch
landed in the dark by her frustrated suitor, Scott, as he tries to protect her from the
unwanted attentions of a college football team. The black eye is the signature of the
screwball comedy, a metonymy for Kay and Scott's knockabout relationship, and a
metaphor for Carole Lombard's feisty screen persona. It is also, strangely, the sign
and reenactment of what must not be seen: the actress's damaged face, badly scarred
on the same left side in a 1926 automobile collision and painfully rebuilt by early
plastic surgery. Hiding what is no longer there, the sign repeats a trauma that has
been repressed. Captioned by the title of the film, which has no apparent relation to
the plot, the black eye continues to bloom with meaning: it is a trope for Evans's own
The Melancholy
of Walker Evans
Realism
57
to the
troubled love life; a social comment on the black eye dealt by the Depression
a
in
this
the imag
houses behind;
graffito put there by the photographer himself?all
ination
of
the picture's
readers.135
A film of a book, signed by a black eye that is make-up covering the damaged
face of an actress who always plays herself before her part. A film of a play in which
an
actress,
an
playing
earlier
an
acts
character,
actress
acting
of
repetition
her
signature role. The posters and the films they advertise, by chance perhaps,
compound the problem of the houses, the billboards, and the street, the problem of
the photographic event, in downtown Atlanta, "starting Friday Mar 20": the problem
of representation to infinity that is the problem of representation as such?represen
tation for which there is no final frame of the real made present for us in the photo
mother's
graph.
as Derrida
then,
Representation,
would
say,
"in
an
not
of presence";
the abyss
accident of presence, for "the desire of presence is, on the contrary, born from the
of representation, from the representation of
abyss (the indefinite multiplication)
etc."
representation,
(163).
toAtlanta proves surprisingly great. For the pho

The distance from Louisville
of
the world itself is rhetorical: it is not merely in
Bourke-White,
tography
Margaret
a
as
constituted
series
of messages whose tropes are present in the
but
telligible,
world.
The
of
message
the world?"the
real world"?captured
by Bourke-White
de
of which it is both the condition and the measure of truth.

codes all other messages,
For Evans, by contrast, the intelligible world is a world of representation, and the
of
proliferation
strument
to no
one.
But
record,
the
camera
on
opens
representation
of pure
is a portal
is also
the
abyss
to a world
a black
box,
of
the
that has
a means
real.
The
of
as an
camera,
no message,
that
this
encrypting
in
is addressed
encounter
beyond meaning, of producing pictures as impenetrable puzzles. The camera is both

crypt and encrypting machine: the tomb of the real in which the present has already
in which the unbearable encounter is
passed away, and an engine of overcoding
buried and postponed, made bearable as the cryptic without end.
This needs unpacking. But I should say immediately that, in this contrasting of
Evans and Bourke-White,
I do not intend to repeat what has become obligatory in
the Evans literature as a means of setting off his supposed ethical superiority. The
usually begins with her personal vanity and
denigration of Margaret Bourke-White
ends with condemnation
of her luridly theatrical and manipulative
photographic
work.
The
cue
here
comes
from
Evans's
friends
and
supporters
in the
1930s,
most
fa
mously James Agee, who chose to include a gushing journalistic interview with Mar
as an unglossed appendix to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
garet Bourke-White
Here, preserved against the vagaries of time and fashion,
(Cameron 450-54).
Bourke-White's
"superior red coat," "the reddest coat in the world," finds itself hang
next
to
Sadie
Ricketts's flour-sack shift and George Gudger's heroic overalls. It
ing
is an image of pettiness that has been reworked many times, most notably after the
1960 reissue of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by William
Stott, for whom the
a moral contrast,
of
Evans
Bourke-White
stand
for
and
counterposed
images
on
ethics
of
and
irreconcilable
life
grounded
practice.136
Bourke-White,
of
tached great importance
course,
readily
confessed
to appropriate costumes
that
she
"loved
clothes"
for each many-faceted
and
"at
day" (Por
58
John Tagg
trait 87). Not at all defensive, she wrote that: "Believing as I do that getting pictures
is only part of getting a picture story?a great part lies in persuading people to do
things?I made a special project of having the right wardrobe for each job. I always
felt more persuasive in the right clothes" (Bourke-White Papers, Box #62).137 But, in
the 1950s, with the security of a photo editor's salary from Fortune, Evans, too,
showed a marked taste for Brooks Brothers jackets, Saville Row suits, and hand
made shoes from Peal Company of London. It is said that he shopped compulsively
at this time, the more so when he was without funds. It is also reported that, in 1961,
he spent the best part of his second Guggenheim
Fellowship award on securing a
coveted Jaguar sedan, for which he was then eager to obtain a Blaupunkt radio, pes
tering his publisher for the specs.138 These are no doubt trivial and salacious facts,
and it is far from clear how they will help us think about Evans's work. Is it not strik
ing, then, that they have been given such prominence in the assessment of Margaret
Bourke-White's?
A comparative
reading of biographies would not readily furnish material to

shore up the critical myth of Evans's moral stature?the
record of the war years
alone might be fatal enough. The ethics of picture making, too, of which Stott, fol
lowing Agee, makes so much, is also something that does not survive much scrutiny.
Even on the trip to Alabama in the summer of 1936, when Evans traveled alongside
Agee and produced the signal body of work that would be made the ethical center of
the Evans canon, Evans, like Bourke-White,
rearranged objects and furniture in
other people's houses where he was working, just as he brought in artificial lighting
and did not hesitate to photograph his hosts unawares
'"The Cruel Radiance'"
91, 93, 94, 104,
(Rosenheim,
with
he
those
pictured and later published, even those with
tionships
as a guest in Hale County, do not appear in a complimentary
light
on Bourke-White's
side, it might be said
vestigations.139 While
and flash,
viewfinder
Evans's
later
claims,
she was
not
unreflective
about
the moral
an angled
n202). His rela
whom he stayed
in subsequent in
that, contrary to
with
implications
of
her
practice. In her technical note to You Have Seen Their Faces, as in her autobiogra
phy, she makes no effort to conceal her mistakes and is the first to raise the difficult
questions of intrusion and exploitation that are only exacerbated by the technical set
up demanded by equipment at the time.140
The
one-sided
contrast
of
Bourke-White
and
Evans
must
therefore
be
ap
there was antipathy on Evans's side?even

proached with suspicion. Undoubtedly,
or
at the John
he
had
exhibited
alongside Bourke-White
though,
perhaps because,
Becker Gallery inNew York as early as April 1931 and again at theMuseum of Mod
ern Art in 1937.141 Bourke-White's
reputed behavior, but also her
reputation?her
that Evans had honed in his relations with his
forth the misogyny
success?called
mother. Beyond this, Bourke-White was also required to serve as shorthand for a
kind of practice against which Evans's backers, such as Agee and Tom Mabry,
sought to define a space of distinction for his work, in the face of Bourke-White's
visibility, success, and critical acclaim.142 The production of a difference was what
Evans's supporters worked for, as part of a discursive strategy to institute a particular
status for his work. Within that context, the ethical terms of the contrast had a func
tion. Outside it, they are not only questionable, but also essentially beside the point.
Realism
The Melancholy
of Walker Evans
59
For what is at stake, and what interests me here in bringing together the two repre
sentations of representation at which we have been looking, is not amoral or ethical
difference whose ethical,
difference, but a difference in the relation to meaning?a
political, and personal implications are not easy to unravel.
For Bourke-White, meaning must be delivered and the viewer must take receipt.
In Evans's image, meaning is held back, seemingly less by the photographer than by
the objects themselves, from which the viewer is cut off by an uncertain distance that
reintroduces the presence of the lens between the eye and the scene. In the one case,
meaning always arrives, guaranteed by the transparency of rhetoric and the finality of
of American capitalism
truth, through which the misrepresentations
photographic
may be confronted with the reality they occlude. In the other, we encounter an attach
ment to the object that does not accommodate
itself to instrumental communication,
but is encrypted, locked away in layers of representation like an infinite series of
is a melancholy
realism whose appearance in the archives of a
a
in
is
and realist quite de
itself. I call itmelancholic
government department
puzzle
a
have
had
in
the
Ideas
but at play within
of
melancholia
West,
liberately.
long history
them, from the beginning, have been not only questions of subjectivity, but also ques
tions of the limits of knowledge, of language, and of meaning. Perhaps a reconsidera
dolls. This
Russian
tion of melancholy
may help us think about the character of those practices of
not give way to the demand for efficient communication but
that
will
representation
resist the arrival of meaning, while mourning a real that does not lend itself to repre
sentation. Perhaps, in the face of the regimens of meaning that speak us and hold us to
account, such practices of refusal are marks not of failure but of a certain kind of re
sistance to which, amidst all the recruitment calls of the 1930s, Evans's photograph
bears witness: as inadequate and overwhelming
thing, impossible testimony to an in
eradicable remainder and to the inescapability of an unencounterable real.143
ENDNOTES
1. The
comments
on Evans
come
from Lincoln
Kirstein's
diary, New York Public
Library
for the Per
forming Arts.
where?Barthes
is, of course, how?or
begins his famous reading of a cover of Paris-Match.
the example?
Casting the event in the barber shop allows Barthes to place his object?the
magazine,
in a little theater of popular culture while, simultaneously,
assuring us he is not himself a subscriber.
See Roland Barthes, Mythologies
selection
and translation of
(201), as well as Annette Lavers's
2. This
text (116).
Barthes's
3. The projected
Magazine,"
4. Wainwright's
"All 250,000
three months,
figure comes from the first, mid-1936

then called Dime.
prospectus
for Henry
Luce's
proposed
"Picture
inconsistent
and may be exaggerated. On page 81, he says that:
figures are, however,
newsstand
copies of Vol. 1, No. 1 sold out the first day." He goes on to claim: "Within
the Donnelley
presses were turning out 1million
copies a week." The numbers Wain
cites also conflict with the circulation figures given in the 4 January 1936 issue of Life itself,
the paid circulation figure for the first issue, 23 November
1936, is put at 380,000, and the print
to 650,000
order for the magazine
is said to have climbed
of January 1937. See
by the beginning
in Life, 4 January 1937: 2-3.
"With This Issue Life Prints 650,000 Copies,"
wright
where
60
John Tagg
to the Editors," in Life, 8 February

1937: 67. A reader, Charles J. Levine of Rochester,
had sent in a photograph of a window
display of the 11 January 1937 issue at Lapidus's
that nearly 3,000 Rochesterians
newsagent
shop: "At the end of the first day, Mr. Lapidus estimated
of charge."
stopped to view Life?free
5. See "Pictures
New York,
study was
cember 1938.
6. The
commissioned
by Life and reported
in an advertisement
on
in the magazine
12 De
is Henry Luce's apology for the third trial dummy of the magazine
that became Life. In 1923,
Henry Luce had been a cofounder of Time as a national weekly digest of news. In 1931, he launched
The March of Time, a weekly
of the news that, in 1935, also lent its name to a
radio dramatization
filmic version.
monthly
7. This
8. This
appears
in Henry
Luce's
notes for a prospectus
for a "Picture Magazine,"
written mid-1936.
a sixteen-page
memorandum
is from Daniel Longwell's
demonstration
accompanying
picture
to show what might be done with Time, but implic
in 1935, putatively
that he produced
supplement
of a picture magazine.
itly to re-enthuse Luce about the potentialities
9. This
text for Four Hours A Year, a seventy-two

is the opening
illus
page, large format, hardcover,
to celebrate and promote The March
in 1936, under Luce's direct supervision,
trated book published
called Life's "Bible" or "Magna
of Time newsreels. The volume was later to serve as what Longwell
10. This
The words may actually have been written by Luce, since they are re
to a maga
in a letter from Henry R. Luce to prospective
charter subscribers
"The Show-Book
of theWorld," 8 September
1936 (Bourke-White
Papers, Box #49).
Carta." See Wainwright

peated almost verbatim
zine called
11. This
is the caption
24-25.
to pictures
taken from the publicity
goes on: "The Great Inquisitiveness

as your cook does, or your taxi-driver."
12. The advertisement

much
13. Bourke-White
collaborative
was
commenting
photo-documentary
on the absolute
book,
You Have
handouts
makes
of various
beauty
queens.
you and your banker
aptness of the title Caldwell

Seen Their Faces.
react to pictures
had found for their 1937
is the opening of the final prospectus

(June 1936), based on a text by Henry Luce. See also the
on the same wording
to
in the letter from Henry R. Luce to prospective
charter subscribers
a magazine
of the World,"
called "The Show-Book
8 September
1936 (Bourke-White
Papers, Box
14. This
variation
#49).
is the image to such a degree of accumulation
15. Modifying
that it
Debord, one might say the spectacle
of social life has become commodity. Cf. Guy
becomes capital. It is the moment when the occupation
Debord, Society of Spectacle,
["con
chapter 2, nos. 34 and 42. For the concept of consummativity
see Jean Baudrillard
82-84.
sommativit?"]
16. This was
(46-47),
by "Faces in the Flood"
of a black baby bundled up on a school
in the Land of High Water"
(48-49).
followed
Bourke-White
"Railroading
which
included
room chair next
a photograph
by Margaret
to a blanketed bird cage, and
of undermined
17. By the following
issue, itmight be noted, the story had run down to one photograph
tracks in Cincinnati's
railroad yards, at the bottom of page 16. Life had moved on to Trotsky in exile,
in full pomp, President
See Life, 22 February
1937.
Hitler
Roosevelt's
struggle with
for example,
the direct imitation of Life's
Pictures"
tisement, "Speaking of Motion
(Life,
for Goodrich
story, the timely advertisement
Stricken Flood Area" (Life, 15 February
1937:
18. See,
Court,
and Tallulah
Bankhead.
in the movie
adver
feature, "Speaking of Pictures,"
22 February
the Louisville
1937: 6). Or, following
Silvertown
Food To
Tires, "How Trucks Rushed
63). Life's picture editor and office manager, Daniel

that Life "came right out of the advertising world of the United States"
on the other hand, completing
to
the circle, Luce urged advertisers
14). While,
with the editorial content"?a
call to which many were eager to respond
photographically
Longwell,
readily
(qtd. inWainwright
"compete
the Supreme
admitted
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
61
re
for a picture magazine,
1936; qtd. inWainwright
(Luce, notes for a prospectus
29). Wainwright
in 1936: "We're going to run you ragged?copy
executive boasting
your tech
ports one advertising
nique so that you can't tell ads from editorial pages" (42). He also records that, in Life's first twenty
spent more
years, advertisers
than one billion
dollars
promoting
products
in its pages
(94).
in
19. The phrase initially appears in the first prospectus
for the magazine with the provisional
title Dime,
It is still retained as a name for the lead in the confidential memoran
30-31.
1936; see Wainwright
dum titled "Redefinition"
Life and reconsidering
that Luce wrote

the original
1937, looking back on the first twelve

See Wainwright
89.
inMarch
prospectus.
issues of
is from a Newspaper
article, 1929. See also Marjorie
Enterprise Association
magazine
In a letter dated "Wednes
"Dizzy Heights Have No Terrors For This Girl Photographer."
was later to write to Daniel Longwell
at Life, "I can't seem to get
day evening" (1937), Bourke-White
over being tired since the flood?I
it was so continuous
and strenuous" (Bourke
suppose because
20. This quotation

Lawrence,
White
Papers, Box #49).
21. Confusingly,
this would
was photographing
that Bourke-White
the Capitol, but
says in the anecdote
Goldberg
on an assignment
she was working
for an earlier February
issue, to photograph
second, rain-soaked
186). For Bourke-White's
inaugural (see Goldberg
photograph of the
suggest
Roosevelt's
see Life, 1 February 1937: 12. This was also the issue in which the
Capitol beyond a sea of umbrellas,
first pictures of the floods were printed: "Floods Drive 288,000 People From Their Homes"
(16-17).
on the Supreme Court appears in the same issue as the photograph
Bourke-White's
of
photo-essay
flood victims and concentrates
life of the new
largely on the lavish fabric and domestic
Supreme Court building, as light relief, one takes it, from the story of Roosevelt's
attempt to force six
of the nine justices to retire following
the invalidation of the National Recovery Act. See Life, 15 Feb
ruary 1937: 20-23.
Louisville
22.
In a confidential
for Life, Henry
memorandum
Luce
written
inMarch
the original
1937 and reassessing
1936 prospectus
any damn human or sub-human institution or
opined: "You can pick practically

the sun, turn a crack photographer
on it (after a little lecture by a journalist) and

under
phenomenon
essay. Fifty or twenty years ago, peo
publish with pleasure in eight pages the resultant photographic
. . .The essay is no
ple used to write 'essays' for magazines.
longer a vital means of communication.
But what is vital is the photographic
89).
essay" (qtd. inWainwright
23. This was
career in 1927, even before

the case within a year and a half of the start of Bourke-White's
she definitively
and industrial photography
see Goldberg
for photojournalism:
gave up commercial
98-99
and Wainwright
89.
24.
See also Margaret Thomsen Raymond,

"Girl With a Camera, Margaret Bourke-White."
Even at the
end of her life, Bourke-White
would be the subject of The Margaret
Bourke-White
Story, broadcast
on national television in 1960 with Teresa Wright
as Margaret Bourke-White.
for this photograph were recorded at the time of the Museum
of Modern
in a letter to Beaumont Newhall
from Margaret
exhibition, Photography
1839-1937,
dated 5March
1937: "When the Flood Receded?taken
in Febru
Smith, secretary to Bourke-White,
with 314 x 414Linhof
camera, Zeiss Tessar lens, 15 inches"
ary 1937, at Louisville,
Kentucky,
25. The
technical
specifications
Art, New York,
(Bourke-White
26.
Papers, Box #31).
In a letter to Beaumont
wrote: "I am deeply impressed

Newhall
dated 28 June 1937, Bourke-White
the possibilities
of flash bulbs distributed
through the room instead of using one attached to the
camera in the usual way. I work mine with extension cords from a synchronizer
attached directly to
the shutter but always use two sources of light and sometimes
three or four or even six distributed
with
the room....
I use a strong light to the side with a small light to the front. The flashlight gives
a soft, very fine quality. The beauty of it of course is that you can watch your subject until they show
or movements
you wish and then release your flash" (Bourke-White
just the expression
Papers, Box
around
#31).
27. For more
on Bourke-White's
technique,
see Goldberg
148, 168, 176, 206, 231.
62
John Tagg
its proportions
that the image was printed in the magazine
nearly full frame.
submitted her photographs,
she insisted that her negatives be printed to the
came to be called "printing black," where the pho
edge, initiating a practice that, in Life's photo-lab,
tographic image is bordered by a black margin as proof that it has not been cropped. This did not
28. We may guess from

When
Bourke-White
however, that Bourke-White

rial process. See Goldberg
185.
mean,
would
to her pictures
raise objections
being
cropped
in the edito
comments:
"As she had known how to simplify industrial subjects and present the de
29. Vicki Goldberg
tail that summed up a process, so she knew how to simplify her human subjects and present a moment
on the page" (188). Elsewhere,
more critically,
that would
she adds:
instantly telegraph a message
with
and
could
in
surety
apparent ease the summaries that made good journalism
"Margaret
produce
a major part of it today. However much she longed to find greater
of her work was clearly intended to be the most efficient and pointed
the thirties and still constitute

sight with her camera, much
porting of surfaces" (190).
Looking back, Roy Stryker, chief of the RA/FSA/OWI

at this time as "noun" and "verb" pictures,
photojournalism
the adjective and adverb" (Stryker, "FSA Collection"
8).
30. Bourke-White's
calls
biographer
small
Historical
adding
Section, would characterize

that "our kind of photography
is
or "the sym
detail," "the symbolic expression,"
to the size of an aphorism
to be instantly
compressed
in a more visually compelling
form than it usually com
of forms in a
suggests: "The muscular
Goldberg
compression
this "the symbolic
bolic moment":
grasped
mands"
in
re
that have been

"opinions
the
often
"a stereotype
viewer,"
by
190). Elsewhere,
(Goldberg
the masterly
distribution
space,
and power.
a poster-like
of design elements,
give her photographs
clarity
content
is equally
and instantly
clear, the message
symbolic
unambiguous
... At times she reduced men and women
as itmust be in a mass medium.
to the status
The
telegraphed,
of message
carriers;
Bourke-White
herself
she saw them

was well
less as individuals
aware of the established
than as symbols or universals"

(317-18).
tropes of rhetoric and their function in ad
in
vertising and journalism,
remarking of one photograph made at the Oliver Chilled Plow Company
1929, for the Fortune story "The Unseen Half of South Bend": "Imade a picture of plow blades, plow
handles which symbolized
the whole plow factory" (Reilly 68; qtd. in Goldberg
190).
analysis of the hierarchy of discourses
composing what he calls the "classic re
alist text," in "Realism and the Cinema: Notes On Some Brechtian Theses." MacCabe
writes: "In the
classic realist novel the narrative prose functions as a metalanguage
that can state all the truths in the
can also explain the relation of this ob
words held in inverted commas?and
object language?those
31. Cf. Colin MacCabe's
is exactly that language which, while placing other lan

[ametalanguage]
ject language to the real....
inverted commas and regarding them as certain material expressions which express
guages between
as finding transparent expression within the metalan
certain meanings,
regards those same meanings
in the sense that the metalanguage
is not regarded as material;
it is demate
guage itself. Transparent
rialized
to achieve
perfect
representation"
(35).
32. Newhall,
the director of the exhibition,
refers to the photograph
as "When the Flood Receded." Number
394 in the exhibition
would
33. On
be one of five pictures
by Margaret
Bourke-White
in what was
catalogue,
in the show.
the current
the Louisville
issue of Life
photograph
see the letter reporting on the outdoor advertising program

campaign,
toWalter B.
of Campbell-Ewald
of New York, Incorporated,
Company
of Manufacturers
Vice-President
of the National Association
of the United
the timing of the billboard

from F. D. Richards, President
Executive
Weisenburger,
States of America,
16 October
Part 35, exhibit 5505, p. 14466-67).

1936 (Senate Committee
The bill
board campaign was held over by the advertising agency until 1December
1936?after
the presiden
to avoid confusion with party political propaganda. Richards
tial election
campaign?specifically
in the American
way of
"Industry's
important job is to establish and confirm confidence
issue"
things in the minds of the great mass of people all over the nation. This isn't a political
that: "The posters had to
(14467). Earlier in the same letter, however, Richards had already conceded
in character in order that the plant operators and the outdoor industry would not be
be non-political
argued:
doing
The Melancholy
subject to criticism
do a good job with
34.
Realism
of Walker Evans
and they had to be of a character

up the outdoor audience" (14466).
in return for their free co-operation,

of people who make
the great mass
63
that would
inMemphis
the Flood. Memphis,
1937
Tennessee,"
Locke, "Billboard
February
During
and the series of frames of "Road Sign Near Kingwood, West Virginia," Feb
(LC-USF33-4211-M2)
Arthur Rothstein's
series of 35mm shots of "A Bill
ruary 1937 (LC-USF33-4228-M2/M3/M4/M5);
See Edwin
and Ml
and M4, which
1937 (LC-USF33-2393-M2/M3
Alabama,"
February
of three
holes by Roy Stryker); and Dorothea Lange's
larger format photographs
Cam
different posters, all titled "Billboard on U.S. Highway
99 in California. National Advertising
Association
of Manufacturers,"
March
1937 (LC-USF34-16209
by National
paign Sponsored
billboard campaigns were also recorded in 1939 by Marion Post
C/16211-C/16213-C).
Subsequent
in Georgia and inAlabama,
and in 1940 by John Vachon in Iowa.
Wolcott
board. Birmingham,
punched with
were
35. For details

Chairman
see F. D. Richards
of the campaign,
Part 35, exhibit
Committee
of the National
toWalter
B. Weisenburger,
16 October
the announcement
also
See
5505, p. 14466-67).
Industrial Information
of the National
Committee
1936 (Senate
T. Weir,
from Ernest
Association
of Manufac
turers of the USA
Jr., of Campbell-Ewald
(Exhibit 5485-E,
p. 14411); and T J. Needham,
of Manufacturers,
Inc., toWalter B. Weisenburger
of New York,
ber 1936 (Exhibit 5504, p. 14465).
36.
Company
15 Octo
chaired
See Senate Committee, Hearings.
Life, too, paid early attention to the work of this committee,
of Wisconsin,
story on the committee's
by Robert M. La Follette, Jr., Democrat
running a full-page
"Life On The Amer
role of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency:
inquiry into the strike-breaking
Two Famous Names Clash At A Senate Hearing"
1937: 19). I am
ican Newsfront:
(Life, 22 February
grateful
to Patrick Kane
for first drawing my
37. For the organization's

public mission,
turers of the United States of America,
to the subcommittee
attention
see the Constitution

Article
II, Section
records.

of Manufac
2 (Senate Committee
Part 17, Exhibit 3788
A, p. 7486).
Founded
subsequently
was
the National Association
of Manufacturers
originally as a voluntary association,
in 1905 as a nonprofit membership
association
under the Membership
incorporated
had
Law of the State of New York. The first suggestion
for such a national association
Corporation
come from the southern
inAtlanta, Geor
journalist, Thomas H. Martin, editor of Dixie Manufacturer
gia, whose editorials during the industrial depression of 1894 greatly impressed Thomas P. Egan of J.
and businessmen
from all parts
A. Fay and Egan Company,
leading the latter to invite manufacturers
in Cincinnati, Ohio, on 22 January 1895. See the National Association
of the country to a gathering
of the United
of Manufacturers
of the USA response to a questionnaire
from the Special Committee
States
Senate
to Investigate
Lobbying
Activities,
24
January
1936
(Part
35, Exhibit
5253,
p. 14023-25).
38. This
is taken from American
39. This
is from Proceedings
Industries,
of the Annual
a boycott
supplement
Convention
dated
of the National
15August
Association
1904 (4).
of Manufacturers,
1911 (86).
40.
See, for example, Life's coverage of the sit-down strike in its 18 January and 25 January 1937 issues:
Sit-Down Strike" (Life, 18 January 1937: 9-15); "Gov
"U.S. Labor Uses A Potent New Tactic?The
ernor Murphy
Strike" (Life, 25 January
and the National Guard Bring A Truce to the Automobile
1937: 8-19). See also the coverage of the sit-down strike at General Motors's
plant in Flint, Michi
Louisville
gan, in the 15 February issue that contained Bourke-White's
(Life, 15 February
photograph
1937: 16-17).
41.
42.
Executive Vice-President
See the testimony ofWalter B. Weisenburger,
Part 17, pp. 7378-79).
Manufacturers
(Senate Committee
In 1936, around 4,000 members
and contributors
income of $1,171,390,
or 48.9 percent
$572,761
of the National
Association
of
of Manufacturers
gave the National Association
of it coming from 207 companies,
representing
five
an
64
John Tagg
of the total membership.

See the testimony
Part 17, p. 7381-82,
7385-87,
percent
of Robert Wohlforth,
Secretary
and Exhibit 3798, p. 7540).
(Senate Committee
43. The
characterization
of the National
tional Labor Relations
44.
See
46.
See
comes
the Constitution
of the National
II, Section
the circular
from
the Na
3863, p. 8015).
is from a speech by J. Phillip Bird, General Manager

of the National
and appears inAmerican
1911 (41).
Industries, December
The quotation
Article
activities
Report to the President, 4 January 1937. See the National Asso

letter to the National
Labor Relations
Board of 31 March
1937 (Senate
Part 18, Exhibit
Manufacturers,
45.
of Manufacturers'
Board Annual
of Manufacturers'
ciation
Committee
Association
to the Committee
Association
of the United
of Manufacturers
Association
States
of
of America,
1.
letter from the Chairman
of the National
Industrial
Information
27 Feb
Committee,
ruary 1937.
47.
This
on Community
is quoted from the National Association
of Manufacturers'
Memorandum
Public
Information Programs to Combat Radical Tendencies
and Present the Constructive
Story of Industry.
48.
The review, A Consideration

ers, was authored by Robert
of the Policies and Program of the National Association

L. Lund and appeared on 7 September
1933.
is a letter from H. O. Patton, for the Board of Directors

1937.
Jr., 24 September
Hayden,
49. This
of the National
of Manufactur
Association
of Manufac
turers, to Horace
50.
See the testimony of the committee

Steel Corpo
chairman, Ernest T. Weir, Chairman of the National
ration (Senate Committee
Part 17, p. 7458); and the statement of Walter B. Weisenburger,
Executive
Vice-President
of Manufacturers
(Part 18, p. 7861-62).
51.
See the statement
of Walter
B. Weisenburger
(Senate Committee
Part 18, p. 7851).
income figures for the Public Information Program were: $36,500

in 1934; $112,659.58
in 1935;
in 1936; $793,043.06
in 1937. The total income for the National Association
of Manu
$467,759.98
facturers in this period was: $480,317.52
in 1934; $617,143.75
in 1935; $1,171,390.83
in 1936;
in 1937 (Senate Committee,
Part 18, p. 7828; Part 17, Exhibit
$1,439,548.06
3794, p.
Hearings,
7538; Exhibits 3834-B and 3824-C, p. 7587; and Exhibits 3824-D and 3824-E, p. 7588).
52. The
53. These
phrases
are from Minutes

19 April
Manufacturers,
54.
of the Committee
on Public Relations
of the National
Association
of
1937.
I am quoting a letter from Charles A. MacDonald,

President of MacDonald-Cook
25 March
1937. See also Senate Committee
Part 36, Exhibits 5540-5624.
to C. M.
Company,
Chester,
55.
See
the testimony
of Walter Weisenburger
(Senate Committee
Part 18, p. 7776;
also Exhibit
3853,
p.
7895).
56.
See Industrial
Council,
57.
Strife and the Third Party,

July 1937.
an unsigned
pamphlet
distributed
by the National
Industrial
See the statement
of Walter B. Weisenburger,
Executive Vice-President
of
Part 18, p. 7862). See also "The American Way" (Part 35, Exhibit
(Senate Committee
and the promotional
p. 14433-39);
(Exhibit 5514, p. 14480).
poster for schools and colleges
Manufacturers
5485-J,
58. This
information
comes
from a form letter by the President of the National Association

of Manufac
Part 17, Exhibit 3850, p. 7762). See also L. J. Mul
(Senate Committee
Association
of Manufacturers
officer in charge of community
to Carl H.
programs,
turers, 29 November
1937
hearn, National
15 December
1937 (Part 19, Exhibit 4047, pp. 8740-41).

The budget figure for art work,
printing, and shipping for twenty thousand copies of three different poster designs comes from a let
ter from T. J. Needham,
of New York, Inc., toW. B. Weisenburger
Jr., of Campbell-Ewald
Company
of Manufacturers,
15 October
1936 (Part 35, Exhibit 5504, p. 14465). In
Bischoff,
the letter toW. B. Weisenburger
from F. D. Richards
of Campbell-Ewald,
16 October
1936,
it is re
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
65
that: "Some idea of the extent of the co-operation

offered [by outdoor advertising plant own
ers] may be found in the fact that the cost of these boards, if the space had to be paid for, would be
about $335,000
per month, or over a million dollars worth of space during the three months' period.
to plant
The labor cost alone in just posting the paper on the boards would amount to over $180,000
operators" (Part 35, Exhibit 5505, pp. 14466-67).
ported
59. This
is quoted
T. Weir.
The
from a publicity
included
circular
dustry Speaks To Millions?With

60.
circular entitled "Along the Highways

of America,"
a reproduction of all three billboard designs, under
Color, Pictures, Facts" (p. 14412).
issued by Ernest
the heading: "In
accounts
It was these "husky" advertising
that kept her penthouse
studio in the Chrysler Building
afloat for the six months each year during which she was not working for Fortune. See Bourke-White,
of advertising
coincided
not only with her
Portrait 80. Bourke-White's
relinquishing
photography
on You Have Seen Their Faces, from July to August
with Erskine Caldwell
1936, but
also with her hiring in September of the same year by Life, then two months away from its first issue.
of twelve thousand
said her first loyalty belonged, paid her a minimum
Life, to which Bourke-White
dollars a year, with two months free to do work that did not compete with Time Inc. publications.
See
between Margaret Bourke-White
Portrait
and Time, In
159; see also the Agreement
Bourke-White,
collaboration
corporated,
dated 4 September
1936 (Bourke-White
Papers, Box #49).
wrote from New York to her friend Dr. Fran?ois Archibald Gil
1936, Bourke-White
to work with creative things like this [YouHave
fillan: "The new job will give me more opportunity
Seen Their Faces]?real
life rather than attractive poses. I have had to do such a great amount of ad
to be able to turn my back on all ad
in the last few years. ... I am delighted
vertising photography
vertising agencies and go on to life as it really is" (Bourke-White
Papers, Box #20).
61. On
15 October
62. The
to persuade
letter, attempting
included the gift of a photograph,
Caldwell
to work with
"Three Women
her on his documentary
book project,
also
Eating."
63.
See also Goldberg

159-60, where,
subject to further (secondary or tertiary) revision, the dream ac
quires "metal beasts of prey," but gives rise to no uncertainty about its dating ("early in 1936"), about
its authenticity, or about its reported immediate consequences.
64.
35 mm shot of the flooding

See, for example, Mydans's
Ohio River Flooding
the Streets." (LC-USF-33-569-M4).
65.
In his red-leather
"Mercy,
Stryker
bound
suggested
in Louisville,
"Louisville,
KY Mar
1936. The
the following
27 January 1937:
entry on Wednesday,
diary, Evans made
(Evans Archive, Diaries,
quick trip to flood. I got Ed. Locke company"
1994.250.98).
to a letter from William D. Littlejohn, Chief of the Appointment
66. According
Section, on 16 September
in Information, CAF-7, at a salary of $7.22 per
1935, Evans was first appointed Assistant
Specialist
on 1Octo
1935 until 30 June 1937. A subsequent
letter from Littlejohn,
day, effective 24 September
this, however, to Information Specialist, P-2, promoted from a salary of $2,600 to
is also the title Chief of the His
1935. Information Specialist
$3,000 per year, effective 21 October
torical Section, Roy Stryker, used when writing toMiss McKinney
of Information on
of the Division
9 October
It is only in the description
of duties in
1935, confirming Evans's permanent appointment.
ber 1935, changed
this letter that Stryker refers to the position as "Senior Information Specialist," "with wide latitude for
the exercise of independent judgment and decision." See correspondence
in the Stryker Papers, NDA
25. Despite
and out into the field as soon as possible,
being urged by Stryker to get toWashington
did not actually begin work for Stryker's unit until 29 October
1935. He himself recorded hav
his appointment with Stryker. See Evans's diary entries
ing first asked for $3,600 while negotiating
for Friday, 30 August
28 October
1935 (Evans Archive, Diaries,
and Monday,
At the
1994.250.97).
time of the flood assignment,
Evans's diary entries for 28 January and 15 February
1937 and the ac
Evans
at the back of the volume show that, in addition to $283.60

travel expenses, he received
salary payments of $120.90, $128.96 and $104, covering the periods 1-31 January and 15-28 Febru
ary 1937 (Evans Archive, Diaries,
1994.250.98).
counts pages
67. Locke was,
in fact, Stryker's
assistant
chief,
appointed
to the position
on 16April
1936. Despite
this,
66
John Tagg
in later years,
182, n47.
Stryker
remembered
him as "an extremely
able, but unstable
young man."
See Hurley
writes from "Locke-Evans Hdqs" at Hotel Chisca inMemphis,

Tennessee. He adds: "My God,
we are tired tonight! Got up at 6 this morning, worked until 5:30 p.m., made the 6:20 p.m. train back to
68. Locke
Memphis."
69. Evans
recorded
Auto
frightening.
in his diary: "Much

road under water.
land flooded
Train
after leaving Memphis,
tracks dry"
(3 February
water
swift and deep
1937, Evans Archive,
and
Diaries,
1994.250.98).
first drove through southern states in February
1934, on his way to the winter resort of H?be
Sound, Florida. He called it "a real revelation." Rural South Carolina and Georgia were "simply un
on his way
for poverty." Evans made a dozen photographs
believable
for nostalgia and incidentally
back to New York, including a street scene in Fort Motte, South Carolina, but his first sustained pho
70. Evans
to photograph Greek Re
1935, when he was commissioned
tographic excursion came in February
on up
in the South, especially
and Louisiana
vival architecture
Savannah, Georgia, New Orleans,
He first photographed
black street life in the South and the segregated
north to Natchez, Mississippi.
in Savannah and New Orleans at this time, but he returned to the
housing of "the Negro Quarter"
Ad
theme in a concerted way on his long, two-stage
swing through the South for the Resettlement
in November
1935 and ending inApril 1936. On the first stage of this trip, in
ministration,
beginning
in Selma, and in Louisiana,
in and around
Evans photographed
in Alabama,
December,
especially
New Orleans. Returning
south in the second week of February
1936, on the second leg of his major
in Louisiana,
Evans continued photographing
black living conditions
around New Or
assignment,
in Birmingham,
and Tupelo, Mississippi;
and inAtlanta, Georgia, on his
Alabama;
leans; inVicksbug
"
'The Cruel
D.C. See Rosenheim,
way to the Atlantic coast and the return route north toWashington,
Radiance
71.
of What
Is': Walker
Evans
and the South."
There
Stryker of 4 February 1937, Locke wrote: "The Negro camp: Overcrowded.
negroes than whites affected by flood in this area. Found 11 in one tent. They are not
about it, but dazed, apathetic, and hopeless. There is a good deal of illness: excruci
'happy-go-lucky'
and influenza cases laying in a dark cotton warehouse"
ating coughs, pneumonia
(Stryker Papers,
NDA 25).
In his letter to Roy
are many more
72.
13 February
1937, Stryker
Stryker professed himself pleased with the results (Stryker to Ed Locke,
James R. Mellow,
for
Papers, NDA 25). The negative judgment is that of later critics and biographers.
nor had it given Evans much satisfaction,
assignment
example, writes: "It had not been a successful
of his illness, partly perhaps because of a lack of interest in what he was doing" (348).
to his friend, Jay Leyda, on 17 March
that: "I had the flu but the flood was
in the Tamiment
Institute Li
refugees and all that" (Correspondence
interesting, highwater,
partly because
Evans himself
damned
wrote
brary, New York University;

qtd. inMellow
diary entry, Evans also noted: "Developed
Archive, Diaries,
1994.250.98).
73.
in an 8 February
1937
347). In the midst of his shooting,
some of the Forrest City films; some good" (Evans
to reserve certain negatives and du

It was Evans's practice throughout his government
employment
between Evans, Stryker, and
correspondence
plicated images in this way for his own files. Moreover,
of Modern Art, indicates that, for the most part, only
Tom Mabry, Executive Director of the Museum
in New York were used in the production
of American
Pho
already in Evans's possession
letters to Stryker, 21 April 1938 and 17 June 1938 (Stryker Papers, NDA 25);
tographs. See Evans's
American
letter to Stryker, 20 June 20 1938 (Evans Archive,
and Tom Mabry's
Photographs,
can be
folder #36). Another exposure of the same sleeping woman
1994.250.57,
(LC-USF34-8202C)
prints
in the Resettlement
Administration/Farm
(RA/FS A) file. It is this pho
Security Administration
next to her, that
tograph, giving a fuller view of the face of the woman and the child lying watchfully
a
was hung in the exhibition,
of
refusal
(LC-USF34-8205C),
showing only
startling image
alongside
the feet and part of the upper face of an African American man whose eyes stare back through a gap
found
in a tent of blankets
on the exhibition
hung for privacy, defying the camera's gaze. Both images, numbered 44 and 43
were severely cropped for the exhibition,
to remove distracting figures.
checklist,
The Melancholy
reconstruction
See the graphic

180.
of the original
hanging
Realism
inMora
67
of Walker Evans
and Hill, Walker Evans:
The Hungry
Eye
Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans re

following Evans's own emphasis on
the work being "arranged and divided and ordered by him," stressed in his catalogue essay for Amer
are arranged to be seen in their given sequence"
that: "The photographs
ican Photographs
(Kirstein
influenced by Eisenstein's
however, Kirstein also saw in the juxtapo
198). Much
theory of montage,
sitions within Evans's photographs
(195). For
theory of opposites"
"living citations of the Hegelian
friend and collaborator,

despite the best efforts of Evans's
me
the thing" and who,
membered
much
compose
very
"helping
74. This
Evans's
see the edited transcript of a taped interview by Leslie Katz

of Kirstein,
and
the
33-34);
excerpts, Leslie Katz, "Interview with Walker Evans"
published
in his notes for the inside front flap of
stress on the arrangement of the photographs,
later recollections
(Evans Archive,
(83). For Evans's
see the one-page manuscript

titled "PLAN or ARRANGEMENT
Photographs,
folder #7).
SEUM BOOK"
1994.250.57,
Photographs,
OF MU
American
at the Library
is filed in the RA/FS A collection
75. The photograph
at
for flood
in
for
food
the
line
Feb 1937. Negroes
camp
standing
of Congress
refugees,"
as "Forrest City, Ark.

(LC-USF-33-9217-M3).
faces actually appear in an adjacent image (LC-USF-33-9217-M5)

showing the young teenage
woman, who holds the tin plate, between two older figures, who may be her mother and father, the lat
ter a robust, smiling man in a hat whom
it is hard to connect to the truncated arm in the better-known
frame.
76. The
"How American
and the Farm Security Administration
77. The Exposition
contribution,
People Live,"
opened on 18April 1938, and ran until 24 April, after which the FSA section was transferred toWash
of Agriculture,
from 20 June to 2 July 1938. The
ington and shown again, on the patio of the Department
Museum
of Modern Art, New York, also offered to tour the FSA exhibit throughout the United States.
78.
inArkansas
comment refers to Evans's 35 mm picture of African Americans
standing in a
which appears on page 46, but also to Evans's eight-by-ten
line (LC-USF-33-9217-M3),
photo
(LC-USF-342
Pennsylvania
graph of a cemetery, workers' housing, and the steel plant in Bethlehem,
1167A), which fills a double-page
spread on pages 64 and 65. The second of Evans's flood refugee
Steichen's
food
in line in Forrest City, Arkansas

of black children waiting
(LC-USF-33-9231-M1),
of 1936 (LC-USF-342-1137A):
"Minstrel Showbill"
53, tellingly below his Alabama
the juxtaposition Evans was to avoid in American Photographs.
pictures,
on page
cisely
appears
pre
to Evans wanting
when recovered from influenza
to go on to Paducah and Louisville
on 11 February 1937 (Stryker papers, NDA
letter to Roy Stryker from Memphis
of Manufacturers'
billboard, all filed
25). Locke made four photographs
As
under the title "Road sign near Kingwood, West Virginia"
(LC-USF33-4228-M2/M3/M4/M5).
79. The
reference
comes
in Ed Locke's
noted
above, Locke
also photographed
the billboard
campaign
inMemphis,
during
the flood
(LC
USF-33-4211-M2).
80. The complete
entry reads:
tacked poster show prints

lunch with R. Stryker
conversation,
extraordinary
spent evening inArlington
with P. Taylor.
simply read: "Reasons for action: Services no longer needed" (National
Center, St. Louis; qtd. inMellow
348). Oddly, Evans would file one further picture
the study of a single New York City block on
inWashington,
D.C:
series with the RA/FS A collection
inAugust
that he completed
1938 with a 35 mm
East 61st Street, between First and Second Avenues,
81. The official

Personnel
communication
Records
camera. Fifty of Evans's

assignment was selected
Block: Walker Evans."
negatives entered the file, but nothing in the written records explains how the
or whether Evans was paid. See "New York City, 1938" and "New York City
68
John Tagg
82.
Itmay be worth noting

same title that MacLeish
and Ellis
that Lorentz's
The Plow
had written
for Fortune
That Broke The Plains

on winter
wheat
derived
farming
from an essay of the

see Drabeck
inMontana:
80.
term "Sound Track"
83. The
is also MacLeish's
and is inscribed on the recto of page 1, above the running
line that recurs on every page of text throughout the book, like the continuous
optical sound
track strip on a cinematic film. See also MacLeish,
"The Soundtrack-&-Picture
Form: A New Direc
tion" 167-70.
black
84.
"We're not telling" (33, 40, 41, 43, 46, 47); "we can't say" (30, 34, 39, 84); "we don't
(1, 15, 31, 80, 88); "we aren't sure" (2, 35, 39, 84); "we get wondering,"
(9, 22, 23, 29, 49, 79,
88); "We're asking" (88).
See Land:
know"
added: "They even reproduced

ing that august name."
85. Evans
one of the great M.
de Bourke-White
pictures without
mention
86. Two pages of grouped handwritten manuscript

notes in ink, 1935. Under "Want:" fourteen lines, in
cluding "all rights retained by me," and "guarantee of one-man performance." Under "Will give:" two
set prints and word records."
lines, "1 complete
87.
See Evans Archive,
Notes
Miscellaneous
1920s-1930s,
1994.250.4,
folder #18:
file on STRYKER
Among
things you really think of me
(1) that you picked me up from a state of obscure poverty
2 that I benefited by having a good job
3 that you gave me my chance and defended my kind of work
And
folder #26:
two handwritten
manuscript
pages:
"Stryker's
background";
and "Stryker & hole
punching."
is a typed letter with carbon, but is unsigned.
See also Evans to Stryker, 15 June 1938 (Evans
folder #35), in which, five days after Mabry had writ
Archive, American
1994.250.57,
Photographs,
ten to Stryker about the proposed
the
"general review" of Evans's work, Evans casually described
Museum
of Modern Art show, but was careful not to ask for permission
himself
to
(see Mabry
88. This
10 June 1938,
Stryker,
89. These
comments
tract for American
1994.250.57,
folder #34).
appear on five pages

Photographs.
of manuscript
notes on small note paper concerning
insertions in the text.
Square brackets denote Evans's
90. One-page manuscript,

"PLAN or ARRANGEMENT
less independently"
is then crossed out.
91. This
is another one-page
92. The Evans Archive
manuscript,
has three different
"PEOPLE
versions
OF MUSEUM
[FACES
(deleted)]
BOOK."
the con
In the text, "more or
BY PHOTOGRAPHY."
of the 1938 draft "NOTE"
for American Photographs,

never published. Miscellaneous
Notes
folder #23 contains a
1920s-1930s,
1994.250.4,
in pencil, on the verso of a letter from Edith McCombe,
one-page manuscript,
secretary to Joseph
Verner Reed, dated 29 June 1938, which
includes draft notes for the unpublished
"NOTE" and for un
which
was
In addition, the American

box contains two
1994.250.57,
acknowledgments.
Photographs,
"NOTE": folder #17, a fifteen-page
typescript versions of the unpublished
typewritten carbon of Lin
coln Kirstein's
of America
includes on its final page a one
"Photographs
by Walker Evans," which
page text of a "NOTE" by Evans, amended by him in pencil, with further notes on its reverse; and
folder #11, a two-page typewritten carbon that incorporates
the editing of the earlier typewritten draft,
but is itself further revised in pencil by Evans, each page having further pencil notes on the verso.
published
93. Two-page
94.
typewritten
Jane Smith Ninas,

on his first
carbon amended
who
photographic
had met Evans

exploration
by Evans
in New
in pencil.
Orleans
of the Greek
in February
1935 and had accompanied
him
Revival
of Louisiana
architecture
plantation
The Melancholy
Realism
of Walker Evans
houses. After a hiatus in their relationship,

following a traumatic scene with Smith Ninas's
in June 1939 and were
February 1936, Smith Ninas and Evans renewed their relationship
27 October
1941. On 21 December
1955, they were divorced and Evans made a point of
dedication from the republished version of American Photographs
that came out in 1962.
five notecard
minder:
reissue
95.
in the Metropolitan
Museum
has
of Art, Walker Evans Archive
J. S. N. dedication"
Photographs
folder #27).
1994.250.58,
"remove
1962,
See Peter Galassi
201. The designation
"Bible
cloth" was Evans's
69
in
husband
married
on
deleting the
A three-by
re
the curt penciled
exhibition
and book
own.
16 November
first exhibition at the Museum
of Modern Art took place between
1933 and 1
archi
January 1934, displaying
thirty-nine of the one hundred prints of American
nineteenth-century
tecture that had been donated to the Museum's
collection
and that
permanent
by Lincoln Kirstein
would be circulated as a traveling exhibit until 1940. In the same year, 1933, through the Downtown
96. Evans's
and Aztec objects for Holger Cahill's

"American
exhibition,
photographed Mayan
of Modern Art," principally motivated
cash. More offi
by his effort to earn much-needed
cially, in 1935, with the support of a grant from the General Education Board, Evans was commis
to photograph all five hundred exhibits in the "African Negro
sioned by Alfred Barr and Tom Mabry
Gallery,
Sources
Evans
of his complete prints. Over the next two years,

portfolios
in two major survey exhibitions: Barr's "Fantastic Art, Dada
in 1936, and Beaumont Newhall's
in 1937. Then, in
and Surrealism,"
1839-1937,"
"Photography,
the purchase of work by Evans for the permanent collection
that
spring 1938, Tom Mabry engineered
was to precipitate
the Museum's
first for a photographer,
from
the hastily scheduled solo exhibition,
and to prepare seventeen
also included Evans's work
Art" exhibition
the Museum
28 September
Itwas
the publication of American Photographs.
1938, accompanying
and later Frances Collins, who represented Evans's main supporters at the Mu
li
cause, Evans thought a great deal less of director Alfred H. Barr and Museum
to 18 November
Mabry and Kirstein,

seum. Without much
Newhall. Even while negotiating

the African Art commission,
Evans made an entry
in his diary on Saturday, 13 April
1935, that reads: "Barr so nice and so confused. Quite a useless
Three years later, worrying
man, I'd say; though a sweet one" (Evans Archive, Diaries,
1994.250.97).
a defensive
about misreadings
exhibition
and book, Evans composed
letter to
of his forthcoming
brarian Beaumont
I do not mean their so called cu

Stryker that ends with a crossed out passage: "When I say Museum
rator of photography who, a[s] I told you, has had and will have nothing to do with my book or exhi
bition, and who as a matter of fact has not the right to use that title" (Evans to Stryker, 16 July 1938,
Evans Archive,
97.
American
Photographs,
1994.250.57,
folder #57).
non
of Photography." The definition of his work as "documentary,
See Evans, "The Reappearance
comes from Evans's draft application
to the Ford Foundation
artistic photographs"
Pro
Fellowship
1960 (Evans Archive, Grants and Foundations,
gram for Studies in the Creative Arts, dated 28 April
The draft proposal begins: "My project is a book of documentary,
non-artistic
1994.250.85).
pho
tographs, with text essay and extended captions, recording aspects of American
society as it looks
It is a visual study of Amer
today. This work is in the field of non-scholarly,
non-pedantic
sociology.
ican civilization
of a sort never undertaken at all extensively
who are all either
by photographers,
"
Some years later, revising his publisher's proposed jacket text
commercial,
journalistic, or 'artistic'
for the 1966 republication
of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Evans wrote: "If most professional
stance or the artistic posture, Evans is in recoil from
is dominated by the commercial
photography
these" (Walker Evans at Work 136).
is from a transcript of a tape-recorded
ber 1971, Archives
of American Art.
98. This
99.
interview
of Walker
Evans
by Paul Cummings,
13 Octo
It may be worth noting that Evans sold 171 photographs

to the Museum
at $25
for the exhibition,
more than his annual salary at the Resettlement
Administration.
each, for a total of $4,275?rather
See the invoice sent to Evans by Dorothy H. Dudley, Registrar of theMuseum
of Modern Art, 19 Sep
tember 1938 (Evans Archive, American
folder #25). The book was less
1994.250.57,
Photographs,
profitable. He received a $260 advance royalty on the thirteen hundred copies of the book distributed
to members,
"Photographs
half on signing the contract, half on delivering

the final material.
See the contract for
1938 (Evans Archive, American
1994.250.57,
by Walker Evans," 6 May
Photographs,
70
John Tagg
in royalties on
1 January 1939 and 30 June 1944, he received a further $249.25
folder #30). Between
toWalker
due on American
1,071 sales and review copies. See Statements of Royalties
Photographs
folder
11 July 1939 to 28 July 1944 (Evans Archive, American
1994.250.57,
Evans,
Photographs,
#55). The book
100. Four-page
and $2.50
carbon of a list of plates,
typewritten
intense
101. See Trachtenberg's

mous" 265.
102.
to members
sold for $2.00
reading
of Evans's
to the public.
in pencil
annotated
American
and ink.
in "A Book
Photographs
Nearly
Anony
that you felt thor

from Via [Via Agee]
159). See also Katz
[sic]" (Agee Papers; qtd. in Rathbone
370, 377. These latter testimonies
83; and the longer transcript of his taped interview, qtd. inMellow
come later in Evans's
to Kirstein
life. Ten years earlier, however, Evans had drafted the one-page
Pho
"NOTE" for the reprint edition of American
typescript annotated carbon of his unpublished
marked
and
29
1961
Art
and
November
Modern
of
the
Museum
Doubleday,
stamped
tographs by
James Agee wrote to Evans on 20 June

introduction
oughly well over Lincoln's
1938: "I had heard
exhibition
and book reissue 1962, 1994.250.58,
Photographs
"In addition, Lincoln Kirstein's
folder #5). Here, Evans concludes:
essay stands out
accompanying
statements made for the field of still pho
as one of the few intelligible, knowledgeable,
illuminating
"revision"
a field commonly
tography,
103. Eleanor
drew
Roosevelt
30 September
Telegram,
is from Evans's
104. This
from H?be
Evans,
attention
and corrupt as a cistern."

to Evans's
in her "My Day"
book
in the New
column
York
1938.
unfinished
Sound, Florida,
Emerson
105. See Roy
muddled
Stryker,
letter in ink on hotel stationery to Ernestine

draft of a two-page
JPGM 84.XG.963.42).
1934 (Evans Collection,
dated February
"The FSA
Collection
of Photographs"
(7) and "Selected
Shooting
(187-88).
Scripts"
106. The first list, in folder #4, is from a one-page

The second list is a one-page
Photographs?"
manuscript
manuscript
in an envelope marked
in folder #5.
"Lists for American
see also "Col

the subject dividers for Evans's postcard collection
1994.264);
(Evans Archive,
drawn by Walker Evans
See further the publications
199-245.
and Eklund
lections," in Rosenheim
"When 'Downtown' was a Beautiful Mess" and "Come on Down."
from his collection:
107. See
the thing," in the transcript of

comments on Kirstein's
"helping me very much compose
his taped interview with Leslie Katz (qtd. inMellow
370). On Barthes's method of writing on index
cards, see Louis-Jean Calvet 59, 189.
108. See Evans's
film maker on at least two

and a would-be
an avid filmgoer, a particular fan of newsreels,
was
made during a voyage as
first
effort
contexts.
His
in
the
1930s,
quite separate
during
that took him to theMarquesas
aboard the schooner Cressida
Islands, to Tahiti,
photographer
109. Evans was

occasions
official
of 1932. His second engagement

and to the neighboring
Islands, in the first four months
Society
film came in the fall and winter of 1936, when he tried to develop a number of film projects,
the proposed scenarios ranging from Resettlement
first with Ben Shahn and then with James Agee,
to unemployment
and slums, to a film version of the
Administration
greenbelt rehousing projects,
Evans
also worked as a cinema critic for
tenant farmer book. From spring 1943 to September
1945,
after re
Time. For Evans's involvements with film, see Mellow
153-56, 336-43,469-75.
Tellingly,
with
to his friend Hanns Skolle

turning from the South Pacific and after viewing his footage, Evans wrote
on 19May
1932: "Movies are more difficult than I realized. I seem to be able to get striking indi
in composing
vidual pictures but have difficulty
156).
any significant sequence"
(qtd. inMellow
see Trachtenberg,
"A Book Nearly Anonymous." While
taking
"The very open
himself concedes,
of montage,
Trachtenberg
toward closed forms and fixed meanings"
(258).
implies skepticism
110. For the best of these in recent years,

notion of the dialectics
up Kirstein's
ness of American
111. For
Photographs
the interlinked
records,
functions
of the Greek
and place of adjudication,
archive [arkheion]
see Jacques Derrida, Archive
as magistrate's
Fever,
esp.
house,
guardian
1-5.
of
The Melancholy
to Stryker, 21 April,
112. See Evans
Realism
71
of Walker Evans
15 June, and 17 June 1938 ( Stryker Papers, NDA
25).
113. Mabry's
letter continues: "since we are rather pressed for time and Mr. Evans is at work on another
book we have decided to use only those extra prints which he happens to have in New York." Mabry
was replying to a letter from Stryker, dated 16 June 1938, that gave permission
for the inclusion of
Administration
exhibition and that
photographs made under Resettlement
auspices in theMuseum's
offered
to make
arrangements
his own prints from file negatives.
to make
for Evans
See also note 73
above.
114. This
on the verso of a note from Evans's

is a one-page manuscript
her hours of work and pay (43 cents per hour).
house
cleaner,
con
Jacqueline,
cerning
115. For a precise
and structure of the file, see "Appendix: The FSA-OWI

description of the development
in Fleischhauer
For a reading of the file as "one of the prime cul
and Brannan 330-42.
Collection,"
tural artefacts of the New Deal," see Trachtenberg,
"From Image To Story: Reading
the File."
and captioned prints were stored in vertical storage
In Stryker's working picture file, mounted
but some grouped by subject. The inefficiency and
cabinets, mostly placed by state and assignment,
led Stryker to hire the museum
confusion of this arrangement
librarian and archivist, Paul Vanderbilt,
in 1942 to restructure
the filing system. Vanderbilt first organized the augmented pic

and systematize
to the original shooting as
thousand lots, more or less corresponding
into twenty-two
or image sets, and preserved these primary groupings on microfilm,
setting some aside for
ture collection
signments
storage. He then oversaw
inal pool into a "classified
of some eighty-eight
thousand prints from Stryker's orig
in six broad geographical
regions, in a sequence of nine sub
from "The Land," through "Cities and Towns," "People as
the redistribution
file," arranged
divided
subject categories descending

to "Transportation,"
Such," "Houses and Living Conditions,"
and a range of social and intellectual institutions and practices.
116. Quoted
undated,
from "Still Photography,"

p. 1.
a memorandum
prepared
"Work," "Organized
by Roy
Stryker
Society,"
for budgetary
"War,"
purposes,
photograph does, however, in an indirect way, undo Stryker's later claim that, in its focus on
"no record of
the local, the ordinary, and the everyday, there is in the entire photographic
collection
8.
of Photographs"
big people" and "absolutely no celebrities." Cf. Stryker, "The FSA Collection
117. Evans's
118. Hurley
April
quotes the interview with

1965 (Archives of American
119. The
full caption
John Vachon."
John Vachon
conducted
Art, Washington,
reads: "Atlanta, Ga. May
by Richard
K. Doud
in New York on 28
D.C).
1938. Houses
and advertisements.
LC-USF-34-8447-D.
of What
Is': Walker Evans and the South" 83; and Mellow
120. Cf. Rosenheim,
"'The Cruel Radiance
300. The Kimball House, 33 Pryor Street, Atlanta, was a local landmark dating back to 1870 but re
built around 1883. One block from the Five Points business hub, it was also a popular rendez-vous
for political
leaders from the nearby Capitol. See Works Progress Administration
Federal Writers
174.
Program, Georgia: The WPA Guide To Its Towns And Countryside
A Danish-born
and poster designer, and a one-time pupil of Berenice Abbott,
photographer
Peter Sekaer had started working
for Evans on 19August
1935, helping to print and mount the sets
that Evans was contracted to produce for theMuseum
of Mod
that same year, while negotiating
for his own position, Evans
tried to get Sekaer a government
job but, in his diary for 10 October, recorded "trouble," the next day
adding that he did not think it would prove as good an offer as his own (see Evans diary, Evans
In the event, without any government position, Sekaer made the trip
Archive, Diaries,
1994.250.97).
of photographs
of African Sculpture
ern Art, New York. InWashington,
in February
1936, photographing
alongside him, when he could get a decent van
and also capturing Evans at work with his view camera, as he had before in Bethlehem,
in November
1935. Sekaer's photograph of Evans, head beneath his black cloth, is in
Pennsylvania
See also Peter Sekaer,
the collection
of the Metropolitan
Museum
of Art, New York (1994.305.1).
south with Evans
tage point,
American
Pictures.
72
John Tagg
121. See Evans's
"Itemized
25). See also Evans
Schedule
diary,
of Travel
and Other Expenses,"
1935 (Evans Archive,
Diaries,
1936 (Stryker Papers, NDA
6 May
1994.250.97).
122. See Stryker to Evans at the Corroll Hotel inVicksburg, Mississippi

(end of February 1936). See also
of April
1936)
[sic] (at the end of March or the beginning
Stryker to Evans at St. Marys, Florida
13April
D.C, on Monday,
(Stryker Papers, NDA 25). Evans eventually arrived back inWashington,
in his car since leaving Gulfport.
1936, having clocked 4,064 miles
of What Is': Walker Evans and the South" 85.
Radiance
"The
letter to Roy Stryker, from New York City, 16 July 1937, correcting the impression
had been with him inMississippi
and Alabama
(Stryker Papers, NDA 25).
123. See Evans's

Ernestine
See Rosenheim,
Cruel
that
Evans
in the late 1930s, living in segregated

Americans made up one-third of Atlanta's population
but not clearly defined city districts. For Evans's photographs,
see, for example, the various views of
in Atlanta
and 8037-A).
(LC-USF-342-8032-E/8033-A/8034-A/8035-A/8036-A
"Negro Houses"
124. African
in Georgia:
would
later be reproduced
The WPA
(LC-USF-342-8033-A)
"Negro Section, Atlanta"
attributed to the U.S. Housing
Guide between pages 292 and 293, though it would be erroneously
The photograph,
1936" (LC-USF-342-8100
Administration.
"Negro Barber Shop Interior, Atlanta,
as plate 6. Compare Peter Sekaer's
A), would be included in Part One of American Photographs
"Negroes'
Barber
Andover,
Academy,
Shop, Atlanta, Georgia,"

Massachusetts.
March
1936, Addison
Gallery
of American
Art, Phillips
all of these negatives were sent toWashington,

since only the Cherokee Auto Parts Store ap
The other prints are now in the
Administration
file (LC-USF-342-8102-A).
pears in the Resettlement
125. Not
at the Metropolitan
Museum
1994.253.346.5,
1994.253.346.1).
of Art, New York
Evans Archive
Walker
1994.253.346.2-4,
(1994.257.37,
1994.257.88,
the plates:
126. See, in particular, Vol. 3, The Decisive
and, for example,
Battles, "To Atlanta"
(104-38);
Cars and Rolling-Mill"
"The Ruins of Hood's Retreat?Demolished
(135); "The Atlanta Bank Be
to the Sea" (215); and "Ruins in Atlanta"
evi
fore the March
(221). The notion of "photographic
in Vol. 1, in the "Editorial Introduction" by Francis Trevelyan Miller
dence" is underlined
(18), in
and in George Haven Put
Lanier's essay, "Photographing
The Civil War" (30-54),
Henry Wysham
nam's "The Photographic
Record as History"
(60-84), where Putnam writes: "These vivid pictures
In
into
the
tense"
1935, Evans also picked up
(60).
present
past
Pittsburg, in December
bring
history
in Portland, Maine,
Brothers
Charles Frey's souvenir album of Richmond,
published by Chisholm
see Evans's diary entry for Tuesday, 3
which he was eager to compare with the New York volumes:
December
1935 (Evans Archive,
127. See "A Negro

342-1284-A)
house
Diaries,
1994.250.97).
in the Greek Revival
and "The outskirts
January
style, New Orleans, Louisiana,"
of the factory district, New Orleans, Louisiana,"
for the Resettlement
Administration
the previous
1936 (LC-USF
1936
February
year, in Carroll
(LC-USF-342-1297-A).
Traveling
on
ton, Kentucky, Evans had also noted: "Courthouse
square/ Main street 1870 architecture/ Movie
main st. posters/ wild west" (Evans diary, 7 December
1935, Evans Archive, Diaries,
1994.250.97).
128. See,
for example:
"Liberty Theater
1285-A); "Billboard, Birmingham,

"Movie Poster, Vicinity Moundville,
129. This
front, New Orleans,

March
Alabama,"
Alabama,"
summer
Louisiana,"
1936
December
(LC-USF-342-8091-A);
1935 (LC-USF342
and the later
1936 (LC-USF-33-31340-M2).
is from RA Exposure Records, Evans Archive,

Evans carried the
1994.250.148.
such record sheets, cov
forms with him and filled them in somewhat sporadically. Forty-one
in theMetropolitan
Museum
of Art,
ering the years 1935 and 1936, are in theWalker Evans Archive
filled out, they registered the camera used, the negative number, the
New York. When
completely
of the subject, the lens used, the shutter speed, the filter, aperture,
date, the place, a memorandum
information
printed
light conditions,
perhaps because
130. Though
and time of day. No other RA/FSA

they were more reliable at keeping
Vachon's
right, to the balcony
seems to have used these forms,

photographer
their own records for theWashington
photo-lab.
image is not quite in focus, what we also see is that damage to the house on the
and to the house's siding, seems to have been repaired. On the other hand, the
The Melancholy
of Walker Evans
Realism
upper balcony of the house on the left has been cleared, the curtains
and there is an air of abandonment
about the place.
have been
73
stripped
from
the
window,
131. For Evans's

lens gave
camera technique, see Thompson

9-17. The two components
of the triple convertible
from "normal" (29 cm.) in combination,
three possibilities:
to long focus (40 cm.), to still
longer (69 cm.).

132. For Rathbone,
to the houses,
it is the black eye that provides the central metaphor,

not only for what has happened
but for "a condition of love" that Evans, in flight from Jane Smith Ninas's husband,
"now understood better than before" (116).
133. See Dialogue

Archives,
on "Chatterbox",
Continuity
New York).
production
#870,
19 December
1935 (New York
State
Albany,
134. See Carole
Lombard
York State Archives,
in "Love Before Breakfast",

New York).
picture
#757,
stamped
26 February
1936
(New
Albany,
116. Rathbone
also titles her chapter on Evans's
to Jane Smith Ninas
later marriage
and their life in New York City in the late 1930s and early 1940s, "Love Before Breakfast."
Asked
later in life by a University
of Michigan
student whether he photographed
billboards
with a sense of disdain or derision or whether he considered
them beautiful, Evans replied; "Well, I
135. Cf. Rathbone
love them, and I'm entertained

("Walker Evans, Visiting
Artist"
by
them.
I feel
they're
and exciting
stimulating
and endearing"
317).
136. See William
More
267-71.
Stott, Documentary
218-23,
Expression
"feminist"
Paula Rabinowitz's
reading should find that Agee's
were fully justified"; that Bourke-White's
tiques of Bourke-White
the profits from her book," "makes Agee's
and Evans's
that "we are left feeling embarrassed by Bourke-White's
project
efforts"
is that
surprising, perhaps,
"
'vicious' cri
and, later, Evans's
red coat, "presumably paid for by
all the more morally
superior"; and
(see Rabinowitz
70-71).
is from a draft of chapter 12 of Portrait of Myself

(13). A little earlier, in another passage
deleted from the final text, Bourke-White
recalls: "The Louisville
flood [burst into the news almost
(handwritten
insert)] [surged up so fast that there was no time to think about what the
overnight
137. This
should wear to a flood. Iwas lucky to find I had a pair of old slacks at the
photographer
and an equally old sweater which
I stuffed into a corner of my camera case (deleted)]"
well-dressed
office
(12-13).
consumer preferences
in the 1950s and 1960s, see Rathbone
212, 216, 269;
on the car radio, see Evans's letter to Pyke Johnson, Editor-in
559. For correspondence
Chief, Anchor Books, Doubleday & Company, 20 July 1961 (Evans Archive, American Photographs
exhibition and book reissue, 1962, 1994.250.58,
folder #15).
138. For details
of Evans's
and Mellow
139. See, for example, Maharidge
and Williamson.
140. See Margaret Bourke-White,

"Notes on Photographs,"
Seen Their Faces 51-54; and Portrait of Myself
126-21.
Stott 223.
in Caldwell
For Evans's
and Bourke-White,
You Have
remarks as quoted by Stott, see
1931 exhibition was "Photographs by Three Americans,"

the third photographer
being their mu
tual friend Ralph Steiner. In 1937, both Bourke-White
and Evans were selected by Beaumont
to contribute representative
sets of prints to the exhibition, Photography
Newhall
at the
1839-1937,
Museum
of Modern Art, New York.
141. The
142. On this, see Alan Trachtenberg's

brief but instructive foreword
You Have Seen Their Faces (v-viii).
Margaret Bourke-White's
to the reprint of Erskine Caldwell
143. For their considerable
and
I wish to thank the staff of the Archives

of American Art, Wash
assistance,
of the Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Division,
and of the E. S. Bird Li
of Special Collections,
at Syracuse University.
I owe a special debt, however,
to
brary, Department
the generosity
of colleagues
in the Department
at the Metropolitan
of Photographs
Museum
of Art,
ington, D.C,
74
John Tagg
whose
New York, above all to Jeff Rosenheim,
of theWalker Evans Archive have no rival.
into the work ofWalker
insight
Evans
and knowledge
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Melancholy Realism: Walker Evans's Resistance to Meaning

Author(s): John Tagg

in social administration as in commercialized

Vol. 11, No. 1 (January 2003)

Life, vol. 2, no. 7 (February

1936 that, "The de

and strangely universal"

n.p.).10 In the drive to har

smart night club faces?faces

looking and looking.

is how Life would finally declare

To see life; to see the world;

great events; to watch

the faces of the

shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man's work?his

Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will

and new expectancy

To see, and to show, is the mission

now undertaken by a new kind of pub

lure is the incitement of the drive?the

drive driven desperate. Everything

the circuits of capital, the violence of exchange?all

For readers, Life was a conduit

to an imaginary integration, national

the story if not the flood was receding,

the lead page of the

Fig. 4. 'The Good Green Earth," Advertisement

have turned their backs

photographic work itself.

the travel, and the life were

image, and inwhich

integral to the package

being sold, in which

an essential part of the story would

always be an account of her

the enactment of the viewpoint as a psychic space, a point of identification at which

of working, with big camera, battery of lights, and

illumination. She sought greater plasticity and contrast, thinking of pho

works by binary opposition, its empirical

are. It does not tell us why

richness only the cumulative

in this image, anchored by the headline:

"The American Way"

and the path of "The Flood." "World's Highest

is a striking economy here. The message of the photograph is succinct,

of a propaganda campaign of the National Association

"Road Sign Near

(Prints and Pho

to go beyond existing trade organizations,

and corporations that contributed forty-nine percent of the organization's

sage, inciting companies to defy it.43

tics of "industrial warfare" showed signs of antagonizing public opinion (qtd. in Ex

(Part 17, Exhibit

versity" (Exhibit 3838, p. 7693).49

to forty thousand additional companies. By 1935, the National Indus

trade associations.51 With this ex

tional program" entailed: press bulletins

(qtd. in Senate Committee

Part 17, Exhibit