samantha.sleger.photography: Walker Evans

I first saw some of Walker Evans work a couple of years ago and went back and used it for the contemporary photography section as I wanted to use pictures of old cars much like he did. Looking at his work he uses a range of objects and people in his images, not really looking at nature for his work. I think the way he has taken a range of subjects and used composition makes his images so effective because he looks at what appears to be just a street or a person and shoots in a way that wasn’t conventional, almost exploring the mundane and every day. I think his best work is in black and white offering a clear cut clarity which is sometimes lost in colour.

Stephen Shore uses his work in his book ‘The Nature of Photographs’ to look at space and Evans documentary style. Shore discusses how Evans uses space in Gas Station and how the sky looks collaged and that Evans has focussed on one part of the image specifically. Looking at one of his other images, Mining Town, Shore talks about how the perspective of the houses in the background show “receeding space” (Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photography, Phaidon Press Inc., 2010, page 38). Evans again uses composition in a way of making you want to explore this place and landscape, I love photos showing old things such as old cars and towns and his work does exactly that.

Joe’s Auto Graveyard denotes a rabble of broken, rotting cars against a vast background of ploughed fields. Here he has used space again as Stephen Shore talked about, seemingly endless and his focus on the cars make you look where it is important. I like how the cars are almost abandoned with bits missing to show disuse and how we have just used them to their purpose to throw them away. The use of black and white in this image to me makes me relate to sadness as well as the title of graveyard connoting death, the cars are the darkest part of the image which highlights damage and lack of care. The cars look out of place just by the side of the road but they add to the landscape, the convergence of man-made and nature.