Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
by Jeff Rosenheim
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jeff RosenheimPhotographer: Walker Evans
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-13
ISBN: 3865218296
Number of pages: 408
Publisher: Steidl & Partners
Book Reviews of Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
Book Review: Walker's straight-on collection
Summary: 5 Stars
Jeff Rosenheim has certainly packed a lot into this interesting book. As well as the four hundred postcards there is a transcript of an Evans lecture given to Yale Uni in 1964, facsimiles of articles he wrote: two for Fortune 1948, 1962 and Architectural Forum 1962, thirteen postcard size prints of his work that MoMA was thinking selling, twenty-seven cards that friends sent to Evans where the front and back are reproduced so you can read the comments of John Cheever, Lee Friedlander, Diane Arbus, Michael Lesy and Helen Levitt amongst others.
I thought the Yale lecture transcript was particular interesting. After a rather rambling start Evans, with the use of a slide-show of cards (twenty-seven of the thirty-three are reproduced here) reveals his thoughts on what he calls the 'Lyric Documentary'. He rather agonized over whether the audience would interpret his love of these cards as a surrender to nostalgia and sentimentally. His passion for such an ordinary medium as the postcard was their simple, straight-on photo style completely devoid of artifice. His own photos reflected this and Rosenheim mentions other creative folk who Evens thought expressed the proper lyrical balance in their work: Eugene Atget; August Sander; Matthew Brady; Helen Levitt and Ben Shahn.
Most of the book is taken up the postcards which Walker Evans arranged in themes, thirty-four are included here. Mostly they are of buildings, street scenes and landscapes. All of them were originally black and white photos then hand colored and printed (in Germany it seems). Looking closely I would say many have been retouched to reduce the size of vehicles and people. Page eighteen has a postcard from 1929 of Morgan City, Louisiana and Evans took the same shot in 1935 but the postcard has no telegraph poles and utility wires, street signs and a bridge in the background. Clearly most the postcards in the book have had an element of re-touching applied to the photos.
Here and there the message and address side of some cards are reproduced and it struck me, looking at the handwriting, that it's a wonder that the cards were delivered to the right address.
There plenty of books reproducing postcards from the years covered by this book but they are mostly aimed at collectors but I enjoy looking at these three: American Architecture: A Vintage Postcard Collection, Postcards of the Night: Views of American Cities and Wish You Were Here: A Tour of America's Great Hotels During the Golden Age of the Picture Post Card, they mostly cover postcards from the twenties onward. Certainly none of them will have the passion that Walker Evans had for these simple cards that is clearly reflected in these pages.
***LOOK AT SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.
Summary of Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard
The American postcard came of age around 1907, when postal deregulations allowed correspondence to be written on the address side of the card. By 1914, the craze for picture postcards had proved an enormous boon for local photographers, as their black-and-white pictures of small-town main streets, local hotels and new public buildings were transformed into handsomely colored photolithographic postcards that were reproduced in great bulk and sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America. Postcards met the nation's need for communication in the age of the railroad and Model T, when, for the first time, many Americans often found themselves traveling far from home. In the Walker Evans Archive at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a collection of 9,000 such postcards amassed by the great American photographer, who began his remarkable collection at the age of 10. What appealed to Evans, even as a boy, were the vernacular subjects, the unvarnished, "artless" quality of the pictures and the generic, uninflected, mostly frontal style that he later would borrow for his own work. The picture postcard and Evans' photographs seem equally authorless, appearing as quiet documents that record a scene with both economy of means and simple respect. This volume demonstrates that the picture postcard articulated a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans' artistic development.Walker Evans (1903-1975) was the progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography. American Photographs (1938), published to accompany his first retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is widely considered the monograph against which all other photography books must be judged.
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