Walker Evans

Sunshine state. Swampland paradise. Tourist aspiration. Real-estate racket. Refuge of excess. Political swing-state. Sub-tropical fever dream. With forms of nature and culture found nowhere else, Florida is unique. It is also among the most elusive and misunderstood of places. Anastasia Samoylova (born 1984) has photographed Florida on intensive road trips. Walker Evans (1903–75) photographed it over four decades. Twisting the visual clichés, these two remarkably discerning observers convey Florida’s dizzying combination of fantasy and reality.

Evans witnessed modern Florida emerging in the 1930s, with its blend of cultures, waves of tourism, stark beauty and blatant vulgarity. He photographed there until the 1970s, making Polaroids that still feel contemporary. Samoylova inherits what Evans saw coming. With intelligence and humor, she picks her way through the seductions and disappointments of a place that symbolizes the contradictions of the United States today. In Floridas, photographs by Samoylova and Evans are presented in parallel, weaving past and present, switching between black-and-white and color imagery, all complemented by an essay from editor David Campany and a visionary short story by celebrated novelist and Florida resident Lauren Groff.

In 1971, Art in America published an interview with Walker Evans conducted by Leslie George Katz, writer and publisher of the Eakins Press.

The interview is charming and illuminating in its clarity and candor. Nearing the end of his life, Evans speaks freely about his influences and how he got started as a photographer (“I was damn well going to be an artist and I wasn’t going to be a businessman,” he remembers), and reflects back on his work and his thinking. The interview has become legendary, consulted by curators, scholars and students for half a century and considered a definitive source for insights into the process, philosophy and personality of one of America’s greatest photographers.

In 1995, the Eakins Press Foundation republished Evans’ interview in a deluxe clothbound edition titled Walker Evans Incognito. More than 20 years later, this new edition brings the Evans interview back into print in an elegant and affordable volume for a new generation. Walker Evans scholar Anne Bertrand introduces the interview and its publication history, and contributes notes throughout the text that provide important contextual information. Walker Evans: The Interview offers an opportunity to rediscover the man behind the famous images, in his own words.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans (1903–75) took up photography in 1928. His book collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which portrayed the lives of three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Depression, has become one of that era's most defining documents. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945, and shortly after moved to Fortune magazine, where he stayed until 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art. Evans died at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975.

Leslie George Katz (1918–97) was the founder and publisher of the Eakins Press Foundation. Until his death in 1997, he wrote extensively about American art and culture, and through his sustained efforts to celebrate his heroes—Thomas Eakins, Walt Whitman, and Walker Evans—found a way to define a new sort of democratic, patriotic intellectualism.

Aware of the immortal power of words, Walker Evans (1903–75) chose to leave a last will and testament, unmistakable in its clarity, in the form of an interview. He made sure that none of his intended clarity would be lost. This he achieved by choosing a close and trusted friend to collaborate in conducting several recorded conversations and editing them into a carefully articulated credo. Much sought and widely appreciated, but previously unavailable except in books of collected essays, the interview that is the text of Walker Evans Incognito is a true, first-hand source: Evans speaking freely about his photography and his philosophy. From Evans' own words the personality of the man behind the great, famously laconic photographs emerges. Walker Evans Incognito gives this brilliant text the grand presentation it deserves.
The book features eight scrupulously reproduced full-page photographs. Each photograph is accompanied by Evans' own comments on that picture. The text of the interview and the captions are printed in letterpress. Bound in buckram, with a tipped-on tritone photograph and mylar protective cover, the edition of the book is limited to a single printing of 2,500 copies.

The eight scrupulously tritone dry-trap printed postcards that make up A Gallery of Postcards were originally produced by Walker Evans in 1936 by contact printing sections of his 8 x 10-inch negatives onto the smaller Kodak gelatin silver postcard stock. This edition comes with an essay by Jeff L. Rosenheim, curator of The Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2000 Walker Evans exhibition, from which these postcards are drawn. "Like a poet refining an idea word by word, Evans often clarified and intensified the meanings of his pictures by trimming his prints just slightly to present the leanest possible image," Rosenheim writes. "With the postcards he took that impulse to another level. Evans was a master of the edge and one of the mediums greatest precisionists."