We’ve also spent some time looking at images from “Walker Evans at Work,” one of five books on this topic, which you’ll find reviewed on the excellent “5B4 Photography and Books” website, and where we examined how the small camera work of Evans — he used a 35mm Leica for the above image — shows how he worked with his subjects, making a number of exposures, and where the sequences, such as we see above, include both his moving around to line up various elements and the actions, often unpredictable, of his subjects — and how this offers us a guide to our work, too!
In the images above, moving from left to right, I think we can see how Evans was at least in part thinking about what to do with the bright white circles in the background that risk distracting his viewers from the faces and actions that are his main subject: he’s got to do something with them, or at least I think so, if he is going to make a coherent image, one where most if not all things have their place and fit together in a special way. His solution was to center the man on the left between the two white signs in the show window and, for the woman on the right, to have the line of lamps receding in the background lead to a vanishing point precisely behind her head — as precisely, I think, as Vermeer had his vanishing point lead to the scales (as we see in the previous post).
The second thing I think we can learn from this image, is to see how he moved to the right to reveal the man’s face, and as he did so, the woman turned to view him, so that we have this curious sequence of gazes: the man to the woman, the woman to us (and maybe the person in front, whose darkened head we see, looking at the man). I suspect you will read this second image like I do: my eye going from the one to the other, tracing their gazes, looking into their faces, and wondering how they fit together.
This leads us to consider how street photography can often be about setting things up, spontaneity, and interaction with the photographer — and as here, about all three happening at once! What a curious combination: planning and accident, design and surprise, balance and then some action which makes things all wobbly! I think that’s why such pictures develop such interesting, curious tensions: the picture starts off being about these people in this place, and then it ends up being about chance actions, the photographer intruding on someone else’s privacy, and then their interacting with him (or her).
If you’d like to explore another street photographer working in this tradition, you might take a look at the webcast about Lee Friedlander on the website of the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts.
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