Evans/Crawford: Kindred Spirits

The reason I was studying Walker Evans will perhaps become clear (to you, to me) in 2009, but for the meantime, suffice it that Evans has been on the brain-- feverishly. And, of course, Ralston Crawford.

Ralston Crawford's photos are often departure points. They find in the world a play of shadows and patterns that is ripe for abstraction, but Virginia is more-or-less right: "There is no such thing as abstract photography." (Yes, she has done a show entitled, "Abstraction in Photography"; more-or-less, you see...) And because Ralston believed that the step off into inventing one's own abstractions was strictly out-of-bounds, his paintings are littered with the debris of depiction, and with a careful eye and the aid of his preparatory sketches and photos, you can wend your way back to the thing itself. It's a fun path, and it's lovely walking both ways: the paintings lend themselves to decoding, the photos lend themselves to ciphers.

Walker Evans, had a sort of hard line against this. The things themselves oughtn't be drenched in style-- John Szarkowski writes (in the 1971 MoMA monograph) that "Nothing was to be imposed on experience; truth was to be discovered, not constructed. It...freed...him from too solicitous a concern for the purely plastic values that were of central importance to modern painters." (p. 12-13) And the pictures tell it straight: as in, fully frontal, buildings that look like buildings, signs that look like signs, people that look like people. The artiness of Stieglitz eschewed, the flatness of the Bechers prefigured. See a picture of a house, page 39 of the MoMA monograph: If any mystery remained, it is clearly labeled with a sign. The sign says, "HOUSE." Get it?

I've been eating, breathing, sleeping and dreaming Ralston Crawford for the last month, and the instant I saw this picture I thought about how Ralston would have cropped in on the middle left side of the house and shown the patterns of shadows as semi-abstract blacknesses. The house would be there-- even the word "House," but in a Crawford photo, they'd've been reduced (or promoted?) to abstract formal qualities. "But Walker," I thought, "would have lost his lunch over such saccharine 'design elements.'" Then I turned to the next plate:


Walker Evans, closet Crawfordite!