Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. James Agee and Walker Evans. Houghton Mifflin Company (March 2000). 528 pages. ISBN: 0395957710. $30, Hardcover.

Walker Evans. Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, and Mia Fineman. Princeton University Press (March 2000). 318 pages. ISBN: 0870999370. $65, Hardcover.

Walker Evans. Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. February 1, 2000-May 14, 2000.

"Too much exposure to art is not very good for an artist," Walker Evans advised his students at Yale in 1974, just a year before he died. I can’t help but imagine that when the photographer uttered this remark he was wearing a sly smile on his face that was as finely wrought as his benchmade English shoes. After all, throughout his life Evans was a man who was less interested in lingering at the latest gallery opening than in scavenging for all manner of trash: beer-can pull-tops, cigar wrappers, crushed beer and soda cans, ticket stubs, driftwood, newspaper clippings, twine. This was a man who preferred newsreels and picture postcards to the blandishments of Hollywood and Madison Avenue, and who proudly admitted that the only photograph from the entire 14-year run of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work that he admired was Paul Strand’s Blind. This was a man whose abiding aesthetic philosophy was to cater neither to the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie nor to those of the avant-garde.

Does Evans’s warning apply to his own photographs? I don’t ask this question lightly. The issue is not whether one should be exposed to Evans’s work. One should, and thankfully there’s been plenty to see recently, from the full-scale Evans retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the reissued edition of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a study of three Depression-era tenant farmer families for which Evans supplied the photographs and James Agee wrote a long text.

Instead, the question is whether Evans’s photos are art—and if they are, exactly what kind? If the question seems outlandish, perhaps it’s because a later generation of photographers—Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus, among others—have profited from Evans’s fascination with the enigmatic and quotidian. His work has an easily identifiable style because we’ve grown accustomed to viewing it through the lens of those he’s influenced. Also, as Jed Perl has pointed out, downtown New York galleries have been enamored with artists striking Evansesque attitudes: "When Douglas Gordon shows some clips from Robert De Niro’s ‘You talkin’ to me?’ scene in Taxi Driver on huge screens at the Gagosian Gallery," Perl asked several months ago in The New Republic, "isn’t he some kind of descendant of Evans, who was so fascinated by the faces of movie posters?"

Maybe. After all, Evans is greater than the sum of his descendants’ work. And even more, walking through the four galleries at the Metropolitan, it’s hard to disagree with the reckoning of Evans offered by Luc Sante in a review of the 1998 J. Paul Getty Museum exhibition of Evans’s New York photos: "At his peak, Evans possessed a conjurer’s genius, shared with certain character actors and a very small number of writers, for making art that appears neither to be art nor to have been consciously made."

Several essays in Walker Evans, the catalogue from the Metropolitan’s exhibition, argue that Evans conjured his photos out of the thick haze of his thwarted literary ambitions. In the early 1920s, Evans was an aspiring writer, cutting his teeth on the work of T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, e.e. cummings, and Hart Crane (who would eventually illustrate the first edition of The Bridge with several photographs Evans took of the Brooklyn Bridge). He appreciated modernism’s formal astringency, its marriage of the comic and grotesque, and its disgust with the religion of commerce. In 1926, he honed that knowledge by leaving New York for a year in order to undertake the standard café education in Paris. By day, he roamed the boulevards as a flâneur and took classes on French civilization at the Sorbonne; by night, he translated Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine and wrote essays about French Symbolist poets. But no amount of bohemian anonymity or gimlet-eyed irony could prompt Evans to undertake the longer works he wanted to write.

Instead, when he returned to the United States with some notebooks and a few snaps, Evans set about using photography as a kind of literature. His talent for concise storytelling is on full display in West Virginia Living Room (1935). The image is anchored by a large corner cupboard that bridges the space between a boy in threadbare pants and a table backed by a wall lined with various placards for insulation. The placards are a conglomeration of garish images—a Santa Claus shilling for a pharmacist, a smiling woman pointing at an unknown object, and a rosy-cheeked mother and child—all of them promising a kind of commercialized happiness that the boy’s overexposed face and broken-down surroundings prove to be craven and false. Without the placards, the photograph would be melodramatic and perhaps voyeuristic; by not cropping them out, Evans establishes a social context and keeps his gaze opaque. Evans is often praised for choosing vernacular subjects, and West Virginia Living Room reveals that Evans understood well that the Latin root of "vernacular" is verna, a slave born in his master’s house, in this case poverty and consumerism.

What’s most striking about Evans’s photographs, however, is something he didn’t absorb when casting about for literary models in Paris: the pursuit of a realism trued by abstraction. Evans grasps the abstract structure within everyday life—the congeries of tones, shapes, and textures in street scenes, objects, and faces—without reducing everyday life to an abstraction. In fact, in his most stunning work Evans establishes a remarkably delicate dialogue between a photo’s formal and documentary elements. Neither is allowed to dominate, yet neither is merely an embellishment; both are the substance of the work. The result is a stunning kind of realism, one which makes the quotidian appear both elegant and raw.

Roadside Gas Sign (1929), for instance, looks like something literally torn from the corner of a Juan Gris or Georges Braque painting, with its mosaic of textures and tones and its use of text as a formal element. Yet Evans’s wry wit saves the photo from being merely a formal exercise. He casually dramatizes the transition from the standardized and old—as in "Any Old" running from left to right across the top of the image—to the idiosyncratic and new, as signaled by the scrawled word "gas" which, considering the layers of frayed paper and plaster to which it clings, seems destined for a short life.

Evans was fond of, if not obsessed with, finding signs of transience in the signage of mass culture, and this interest is a large part of his impact on contemporary artists. In Torn Movie Poster (1931), he focuses on the drama latent in a wind-ravaged movie advertisement. The removal of foreground and lateral ground makes the movie poster into an artifact; it is Evans’s subject as well as his object. And instead of being torn by outside forces, it seems to be succumbing to the beautiful decay within it, evident in the scarred, paint-flecked, and texture-rich wood that appears to have eaten through the woman’s forehead. The faces of the man and woman are a study in obsolescence: the drama of the new immediately grown old and useless. Yet in a curious way the poster is not a grotesque; despite the melodrama gripping the couple’s faces, the poster is a ruin of a rapid and ready-made culture that Evans, by focusing on it so tightly, has shorn of affect.

Late in his life Evans grew fond of collecting the kinds of roadside signs that he once only photographed. He would arrange the signs at his home, and even mounted some of them in an exhibition of his work at Yale in 1971. One of his most peculiar installations featured a half-dozen "No Trespassing" signs, all arranged in a row and each identical except for their degrees of rust-wrought disintegration. These signs are not among the few displayed in the fourth gallery of the Metropolitan, but their absence is hardly felt. Taking in the photographs of subway riders, harried pedestrians, tenant farmers, Southern hamlets, girders, and garbage, one sees Evans not only trespassing into neglected, anonymous corners of American life, but also coming away with photographs that make his subjects into something altogether different, while also leaving them seemingly untouched.

John Palattella’s essays on American poetry and culture have appeared in Lingua Franca, Dissent, Newsday, and other publications. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.