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- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
FeaturesMarch 2000 The passion of Walker Evans Considering the retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art America’s infatuation with photography has thrived upon its easy accessibility. By 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, George Eastman had made the roll-film camera so cheap that soon no family reunion or Sunday picnic need ever lack a “photo artist” to immortalize it. Amateur camera societies and photo exhibitions sprang up in cities and towns from coast to coast. And while professionals like Alfred Stieglitz fought for “the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression,” arguing that the photographer’s gift, like the painter’s, was privileged vision, the larger public remained quite content with the belief that one person’s photo was pretty much as good as another’s. It would be Walker Evans’s destiny, in a career that spanned five decades, to settle the question of “privileged vision” once and for all. That he did so whil ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 18 March 2000, on page 14 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/walkerevans-epstein-2696
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