Walker Evans, [RMS Queen Mary: Promenade Deck, Bow View, Port Side], circa 1958
In late 1957 or early 1958 Walker Evans traveled to London from New York by ship. Biographies of Evans don't count this as a significant trip, so details are scarce. There's a 1958 date book at the Met, but no scans are online. It's possible one direction he traveled on the RMS Queen Mary, the other direction took the SS Liberté.
At the time Evans was mainly doing editorial work, most notably for Fortune magazine, but in 1958 he began shooting features for Architectural Forum. In the April issue they published "London Look." The Met has a larger portfolio of photographs made for the feature.
Walker Evans, SS Liberté.
It's unclear if the study of ships was assigned ahead of the trip or if Evans made the photos during the voyage and pitched it after. (Evans had taken a trip on the Liberté as early as 1954, so it's possible some frames in the 1958 spread are from that previous trip.) The result was published in the October 1958 issue as a four page feature.
The Met has a portfolio of 54 photographs labelled Liberté, but this is incorrect, as it has photos from both ships. Getty has three photographs of the Queen Mary, in the form of work prints, with Evans writing the caption in pencil. Amon Carter has another. Perhaps a maritime expert could determine which frames in the batch of 54 labelled Liberté are actually Queen Mary.
Evans' main camera on this trip, both land and sea, seems to be the Rolleiflex, but a batch of 35mm frames show a dining room scene (the Met's jpegs are very tiny). The frames that show people out on deck without heavy coats make me question the "early" 1958 timeframe.
Perhaps the most interesting photographs Evans made in London are the portraits of Lucian Freud. One roll of film, twelve frames. Evans had become involved with Freud's ex-wife Caroline Blackwood and the encounter was awkward, at least on Evans' side. Freud described Evans as nervous, "a mixture of noble behavior and alcoholism."
Searching for more sources for the Queen Mary photos, I came across the work of Matteo Pagliarulo, a 3D artist who creates detailed renderings of ships. Using the Getty's aged sepia work print as the source, Pagliarulo created a rendering of, depending on how you look at it, either Evans' photo or the ship depicted in the photo.
Walker Evans work print / Matteo Pagliarulo's rendering
This Evans photo is a very deep cut in the ouvré, so I asked Matteo why he picked it:
At the time I was still in the initial phase of learning photorealism, I was starting to feel more confident with Blender (the 3D software) so I decided to try replicating a photograph to learn more. Frankly, I don’t exactly recall how I found this particular Walker Evans photo, considering my passion and interest in maritime history and ships/boats, it probably presented itself on social media feed and inspired me to create a 3D replica.
So the photo came across Pagliarulo's screen in a digital flotsam of vintage ship photos, unrelated to Walker Evans.
Matteo Pagliarulo's rendering of Evans' Queen Mary photograph
Pagliarulo has created a rendering of the ship to closely match the photo, but the photograph is specific, black and white, with the aspect ratio and lens characteristics of the Rolleifllex. Evans' composition using the square makes no effort to capture the size or grandeur of the ship.
The Evans is very minimal compared to your other work?
Compared to more recent creations, this is indeed more minimalistic (or ‘minimalista’ in Italian). As I mentioned before, the reason I made it was so I could push my boundaries and learn new techniques in 3D and this photo was–and still is–perfect as the subject shown isn’t particularly complex. After the realization of this project I gave myself more challenges and ultimately I still come back to comparing my work to photographs as they’re the best witnesses of reality. One more recent example is the rendition of RMS Titanic’s propellers with a very similar angle of a famous photograph of RMS Olympic.
unknown photographer SS Olympic propellers 1924 / Pagliarulo's render of RMS Titanic’s propellers based on the Olympic photo (no photo was made of this angle of the Titanic)
Pagliarulo's rendering brings to mind Thomas Demand, who builds sculptural scenes out of paper and then photographs those scenes. Demand’s sources are often news photographs, so he’s going from news photos to paper model to his own photo of the paper model. Pagliarulo's rendering gives me a bit of the experience with the Evans, though Demand's source material is often brutally mundane compared to a photo like the Olympic propellers.
Proof Inc's rendering of source footage of the Pacific Sun cruise ship listing violently, which Demand used to create his paper models.
In 2011, while Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, Demand made Pacific Sun, a video work to recreate CCD footage of the inside of a cruise ship caught in a violent storm which Demand found on YouTube. He commissioned a 3D rendering of the video, mapping the objects' positions during the ship's dramatic list. He then recreated this in paper and animated it with 2400 stop-motion frames. So: ship's CCD video, Youtube edit, 3D model, paper model, finished 100 second video.
In Getty's 1995 Walker Evans publication Judith Keller suggested that the Evans ship photos were inspired by Charles Sheeler's 1929 painting "Upper Deck." Harvard museum has a ridiculously small jpeg of the painting, while the Met has a ridiculously small jpeg of the source photograph Sheeler used for the painting. And Getty has the photograph that Sheeler took to document the finished painting.
Charles Sheeler's photograph of his 1929 painting "Upper Deck," which itself was based on a photograph.
Just as some paintings are transmutations of photographs, Sheeler's photograph-turned-painting was made aboard the SS Majestic, formerly the German SS Bismarck, which became a British ship after World War I. Similarly, the SS Europa, a German ship, became the French SS Liberté after World War II.
Just a few years after Evans' 1958 trip, transatlantic air travel eclipsed ocean liners. The Liberté was scrapped in Italy in 1962. The Queen Mary lasted until 1967, before being permanently moored in Long Beach, California, as a tourist attraction and hotel. I see the ship most days in the distance from Ocean Blvd, but have never been on board. In our chat, I promised Matteo that when I finally go for a tour, I'd snap some photos from the port side of the promenade deck.
Whilest preparing for a regular transatlantic crossing to New York in Le Havre in April of 1939, a fire broke out on board the french SS Paris. Only barely it was managed to save many precious artworks which were on board and the Paris eventually capsized (as it was the case with the Normandie some years later, too much water had been pumped in to extinguish the fire) and sank, blocking the harbor. The ship was considered a total loss, but her complicated position and the outbreak of WW2 a few months later made it impossible for the authorities to salvage it. After the war the TS Europa was towed to Le Havre as a war reparation. During a storm the ropes of the Europa (now renamed Liberte) broke off and she began to drift through the harbor, eventually colliding with the Paris and sinking (although, as one can see on the photo, the low depth prevented her from being significantly damaged by this process). For a half a year the port of Le Havre was somewhat paralized by two sunken ships. Only in April of 1947 both could be salvaged: the Liberte was repaired and served for the next 15 years on the North Atlantic, whilest the SS Paris finally could be scrapped.
The first class lounge of the SS Liberte. Finished in 1930 as TS Europa for the North-german Lloyd, she had to be given to the french CGT after the war as a war reparation. She operated on the North Atlantic line for 14 years until she was put out of service in 1961 and scrapped in 1962.
