Walker Evans. Self portrait at a photo booth. 1927. © Featured at Photograph magazine, Jan. 2018.
By Paul Goldfinger, Photography Editor @Blogfinger.net
The exhibit of Walker Evans’ work currently taking place at the SFMOMA is huge, with over 300 prints of Evans’ work, but this 1927 self portrait is misleading, because it does not represent the style of photography for which he became famous. And certainly,”artfully blurred” was not his shtick. Nevertheless, it is fun to see Evans as he saw himself.
This comment is from Photograph magazine’s review of the exhibit:
“At the start of SFMOMA’s deep-dive Walker Evans retrospective, on view through February 4, there’s an artfully blurred photo booth self-portrait. The 1927 picture has an ebullient energy that’s pure selfie – telegraphing that this formidable historical show has surprisingly contemporary relevance.
“Evans was clearly interested in the vernacular, and his work resonates in the age of Instagram, when delightful and mundane images of ordinary moments flood our lives. The exhibition is chock full of photographs and ephemera – Evans was a collector of postcards and signage – that bring to mind countless examples of artistic strategies employed by subsequent photographers (street photography, typologies, pop art, New Topographics, conceptual strategies, and questioning the veracity of the documentary image).”
If you read the comment above, and try and wade through the vocabulary, the artsy crowd tries to see him as an innovator, responsible for many photo art ideas which came after him. True, he was an innovator, perhaps one of the first to take a selfie, but you can’t connect those dots and credit him as the inventor of selfies.
Selfies are not new—only the word is. Photographers have often taken self-portraits simply by sticking their cameras on tripods and using a shutter timer or a hand held release. Photo booth machines are old news and millions of people took their own portraits that way–even today, often at weddings.
Evans was in fact a photographer of the American vernacular, enjoying shots of Americans at work and play or even photographing junky cars or store window signs. That work was stylish then and copied later by Robert Frank in his 1950’s book The Americans and also by many street photographers in the US such as Gary Winogrand and so many others.
But Evans was a classic image-maker using 8×10 large format cameras as did Ansel Adams, unlike photojournalists such as Cartier Bresson and Robert Capa who liked to prowl the streets with small Leicas. Evans is best known for his depression era images taken as part of the FSA team of brilliant photographers, some of which we have already shown on Blogfinger.net, including Dorothea Lange.
Here is a typical Walker Evans photograph:
Walker Evans: Roadside Stand Near Birmingham, Alabama. 1936 ©
Below is a link to another post of ours on Walker Evans published in 2016 on Blogfinger.net:
WILBERT HARRISON:
Soho Photo Gallery in NYC has had a Krappy Kamera show annually for over 20x years. Was in it years ago with fotos of Palace Amusements Building & the lions at Monmouth U. done with handmade camera .
Frank: I enjoyed your comment, including the anecdote about Andy Worhol.
It’s not surprising that Worhol would be attracted to the photo booths, because they offered an embracing environment, and squeezing into those phone- booth sized spaces, often with one or more close friends, made for intimate expressions. And the results had a unique physical quality, complete with blurring, odd tones, and even motion in the form of rapid sequences. Worhol probably liked the spontaneous quality of those images.
It reminds me of the “crappy cameras,” plastic, film based, and complete with light leaks,imperfections and motion—all of which made for interesting results. The Holga is a classic.
There have been gallery shows of photos made with such “crappy” but evocative devices.
I used to operate a black and white (chemical) photo booth in the basement of Shoppes At The Arcade (formally Woolworths) in Asbury Park. That photo booth was from Palace Amusements. It is now in Silverball but alas it is now digital.
The history of photo booths is fascinating—-invented by a Russian . Lines of folks enjoyed photo booths in Times Square—NYC (and other cities) as they were affordable alternative to have a portrait photograph versus expensive photo studios .
Andy Warhol was a big photo booth user. He used one in Union Square NY nearby his studio/”factory” .