Ongoing Moment (eBook)

While the survey of photography undertaken in these pages can claim neither this degree of rigour nor eccentricity, it takes heart from earlier, well-intended attempts to marshal the infinite variety of photographic possibilities into some kind of haphazard order. Walker Evans said it was 'a pet subject' of his -- how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'. In the case of Walt Whitman there was nothing unconscious about it. 'In these Leaves [of Grass] every thing is literally photographed,' he insisted. 'Nothing is poeticized.' Keen to emulate the 'Priests of the Sun', Whitman created poems that, at times, read like extended captions in a huge, constantly evolving catalogue of photographs: See, in my poems, cities, solid, vast, inland, with paved streets, with iron and stone edifices, ceaseless vehicles, and commerce, See, the many-cylinder'd steam-printing-press -- see, the electric telegraph stretching across the continent, [. . .] See, the strong and quick locomotive as it departs, panting, blowing the steam-whistle, See ploughmen ploughing farms -- see, miners digging mines -- see, the numberless factories, See mechanics busy at their benches with tools [. . .] For his part Evans, in 1934, compiled a list of picture categories as a way of clarifying his own ideas about what he was trying to do in his work: People, all classes, surrounded by bunches of the new down-and-out. Automobiles and the automobile landscape. Architecture, American urban taste, commerce, small scale, large scale, clubs, the city atmosphere, the street smell, the hateful stuff, women's clubs, fake culture, bad education, religion in decay. The movies. Evidence of what people of the city read, eat, see for amusement, do for relaxation and not get it. Sex. Advertising. A lot else, you see what I mean. The cultural historian Alan Trachtenberg has pointed out that this list calls to mind Lewis Hine's earlier Catalogue of Social and Industrial Photographs, 'only seasoned with Evans's irony'. But it's more than irony that sets the two endeavours apart. Hine's is an entirely logical and rigorous listing -- 'Immigrants', 'Women Workers at Work', 'Men Workers at Work', 'Incidents of a Worker's Life' and so on -- comprising over a hundred topics and more than eight hundred sub-topics. A model of orderly arrangement and organization, it is entirely lacking in the provisional, highly contingent and ultimately unsustainable ('a lot else') quality of Evans's catalogue of his own intentions. Some of Evans's best-known work was done under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration between 1935--37. Known first as the Resettlement Administration, this was one of Roosevelt's New Deal agencies aimed at improving the lot of poor farmers and sharecroppers brought to the brink of starvation by the Depression. The FSA was headed by the economist Rexford Tugwell who, in 1935, appointed his old teaching assistant Roy Stryker to run the Historical Section. Both men were convinced of the power of photographs to give a human reality to economic arguments but it was not until the fall of that year, when Stryker was granted sole responsibility for making a photographic record of the agency's policy and work, that he got a clearer sense of his task -- and of his power. This was brought into still sharper focus when he saw some photographs that had already been commissioned. They'd been done by Evans and were sufficiently impressive to secure the photographer the post as Stryker's Senior Information Specialist. Evans viewed this appointment as a kind of 'subsidized freedom', but,...