… Is America a material or an imagined place? Does it lie somewhere on the other side of the pictures, in a space shared with the camera, or does it lie in the pictures, coterminus with the photographic act itself, a product of the camera? Did [Walker] Evans see it, or make it up? Or, indeed, as Szarkowski suggests, both? And if both, in what proportions? Is there a discernible line marking a boundry between the real and the imagined, a point at which we can say one turns into another, where an America of fact becomes — perhaps realizes itself as — an America of Evans’ artifice, an artifice whose leading attribute (though in what sense we cannot yet know) is its Americanness?
That quote and all of the extracts, below, are from an essay about the Walker Evans book, American Photographs. The essay, Walker Evans’ America: A Documentary Invention by Alan Trachtenberg is in the collection of essays, Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography edited by David Featherstone (1984).
When Walker Evans’ American Photographs appeared in 1938, reviewers assumed at once that the pictures represented a real and demonstrable America …. Indeed so manifestly did an exterior world seem, to the early reviewers and to most viewers since, to impress itself upon this artist, shaping, molding and exhaustively filling his pictures, that style, technique and pictorial form seem irrelevant, hardly noticeable.
… This view of Evans, and of American Photographs – that he prepares a list of particulars, that he inventories a “real” America — has remained more or less intact. “Individually,” wrote John Szarkowski in 1971, “the photographs of Walker Evans evoke an incontrovertible sense of specific places. Collectively, they evoke the sense of America.” To be sure, “evoke” leaves unsettled the question of whether Evans merely recorded his incontrovertible America, or made it up. It equivocates that is, about origins. Nevertheless, Szarkowski writes, “whether the work and its judgment was fact or artifice, or half of each, it is now part of our history.”
… Being photographs, of course, the pictures in American Photographs do bear a special relation to their subjects; they do inform us, at one level of understanding, that a photographer and camera were indeed there at a certain time. But the there of the camera’s place and the there of the book are quite different locations; different not only in place, but in kind of place. One is an actual physical site, where a shutter was released and a photographic exposure made; the other is an immaterial place, a physical book to be sure, but still a place to be made up by the reader-viewer in the course of experiencing the book.
… I want to reconsider the book’s relation not so much to an America that might be said to have existed in certain determinate and discernible forms, but rather to an idea of America, an idea of how or where an America might be located and identified within the book itself. By an idea of America, I mean an idea regarding the status of the term, the place or the site, the locus in quo of America. The question of whether the book discovers or invents, whether it transcribes or creates, depends very much on what kind of reality we take the book to be representing. Of what, finally, are these pictures documents?
Following those opening meditations, Trachtenberg goes on to make a very detailed examination of the first sequence of six photographs in the book:
… They are, of course, texts within a larger text, within a book. What the pictures say they say in relation to each other; the full voice of each image is released only when we leave that image behind in quest of the next, the following and finally all following images in the book. What they say they say in and through the relations among the totality of images which constitutes the book: the book itself finally constituting the meaning, the speech of the pictures. Rather than merely a way of presenting a group of pictures, the form of the book draws the viewer-reader into a process of unfolding, a developing discourse of continuities, echoings, doublings and cancellations, revisions, climaxes and resolutions. Each picture completes itself only in the complete work, its voice returning to it as an echo of the whole. The process is cumulative, with implications gathered and strung together at each successive passage from one image to the next. We partake, then, not only of a list that has been prepared, but in the making of that list, in the preparation itself, the ordering of images.
For what the book places in order is precisely a domain not of things as such, of unequivocal objects in the world exterior to the camera, but of images, things already in the condition of image, of representation. In its critical opening sequence, the first six pictures, the book declares the making, status, social ramifications and actions of the image to be at least one of its subjects, what it meditates upon while in the act of performing that very theme: making and instituting images. How that subject — the image of things — stands in relation to the subject of America as a specific (and historical) order of things — is among the questions framed by the opening sequence.
Finally, at the end:
By contrast and differentiation, the opening pictures insist that the camera is an instrument of construction, not mere transcription; that it plays a role in the making of the world it depicts as image. The book opens, then, with an unequivocal break with the notion of an infallible camera and transcribable America. The frame — what it excludes, what it compels us to imagine as outside its limits — serves as the maker’s inscription, the signature of his own performance.
… Evans’ America is not a finished place, but a series of acts, of gestures toward the making of a place. There is no immanent whole here named America, but a meditation on perception and on the making of reality, on the character of images and on the sufficiency of art. The art arises from the craft of photography, the craft of mechanical transcription, of documentation, but it goes beyond that. The documentary mode, of exact reproduction for the sake of conveying the look of things, is only a means here; the end is the making of a fictive world, an America of the imagination: a documentary invention.
Even with the long quotes given here, this is only a small part of the full essay, which is excellent. Unfortunately, I can’t find it anywhere online.
-Julie
