Walker Evans and the Aesthetics of the Rejected Object
Stamped Tin Relic, (1929), Trash Can, (1968), Three Untitled Photographs Shot in New York, (1968), Untitled photograph shot in an unknown location, (1968), Evan’s Bedroom Washbowl photographed after his death, (1975)
Walker Evans found in the debris of contemporary society a particular kind of poetic beauty, which he seemed quite convinced Baudelaire would appreciate. He once postulated an aesthetic of ruin, of the rejected: “A ruin,” he said, “is more interesting than a freshly completed building. It shows the effect of time and experience.”
Evans systemized this aesthetic of the rejected object in a project that he carried out in the 1960’s, but whose premises are to be found in the earlier photograph, “Stamped Tin Relic” of 1929 which opened the second section of the book American Photographs. There he found that, “even the garbage can occasionally, to me at least, can be beautiful.” In this later work, he uses his camera to explore very small areas of ground, microcosms of territory, registering the minute debris they contain, the assortment of rubbish noted by the camera held absolutely straight: a lunar landscape whose uncertain scale helps to confuse recognition, rather like Marcel Duchamp’s “Elevages de Poussiere” photographed by Man Ray in 1920. Here heterogeneous objects presented with minimalistic effect sometimes recall Cy Twombly’s delicate calligraphic paintings of this period.
With this body of work, Evans contributed to a trend in contemporary photography that asserts denial of the photographic subject as an element to be given prominence. It was as if Evans, like some perverse and scrupulous detective, was setting up a police file on the trail of rotting objects at a “scene of the crime.”
One can hardly fail to see the connection between these images and those created much later by Lewis Baltz, particularly, his photographic project entitled San Quentin Point of 1985. In this, Baltz follows up, in a systematic fashion and within a different ecological perspective, Evans’ manner of photographing the unphotographable, the detritus and waste of industrial society.
- Gilles Mora, from The Hungry Eye, Abrams, (2004)
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