Walker Evans, écrits et propos. Edition critique

Résumé du livre

This thesis aims to provide a critical study of the texts Walker Evans (1903-1975) signed and published during his lifetime. One of the most important photographers of the United States, from his exhibition "American Photographs," at the Museum of Modern Art(MoMA) of New York, and the eponymous book, in 1938, Evans first wanted to become a writer. With the exception of one decade, from the early 1930s to the early 1940s, when hefocused solely on photography and produced the core of his work, never in his life did Evansstop writing. However, he did not theorize about photography but sparingly, and quite late in life. An essay is considering the relation of the photographer to writing ; a selective anthology gathersmost of his texts, each with an introduction which presents and analyses its contents, in the light of sources from the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; an iconographical volume reproduces Evans's publications combining his texts and images. Evanswrote as a critic for Time Magazine (1943-1945) beside his friend Agee, then contributed to Fortune(1945-1965). He there invented the form of portfolios combining a short text he would write and images, either by him or by others, often times on vernacular subjects. Furthermore, he would sign critical essays in various periodicals, particularly on photography. From the end of the 1960s, while he was teaching at Yale University, he would publish a few theoretical writings which are decisive for the history of the medium, notably the interview with Leslie Katz which was published at the occasion of Evans's second retrospective at MoMA, in 1971. Here Evans coined the phrase "documentary style", which qualified his own photography, and would apply to manyworks by contemporary artists. At get being his main reference for photography, the other references he mentions are principally literary: Flaubert and Baudelaire, or James, Proust, Nabokov. They indicate how concerned the photographer was, always, with writing, and style.