Walker Evans

When NBA-winning biographer James R. Mellow (Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein & Company) died in 1997, he left behind an unfinished manuscript on the life of American photographer Walker Evans. That manuscript makes up the bulk of this book, and chronicles, in abundant detail, the first 53 years of Evanss life: 16 pages of Mellows notes conclude the volume by outlining Evanss activities from 1955 to 1977. This dense, well-documented study should satisfy anyone seeking a comprehensive account of Evanss early life, influence and photographic achievement, crowned by Evanss one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 (the first photographer to be so honored) and by his collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Mellow traces Evanss modern style with an expert eye, finding its source in the French photographer Eugene Atget, and its birth in 1926, the year Evans (who had wanted to be a writer) spent in Paris. Mellow glosses over a key incident in Evanss early years: when Evans was 15, his father, a Midwestern advertising executive, moved in with the familys next-door neighbor, neither divorcing Evanss mother nor marrying the neighbor. This duplicitous arrangement surely helped produce an adolescent who grew up to value candor in his photography. Mellows analyses of the photographs he reproduces, however, and Hilton Kramers excellent introduction, help explain why his work seemed so modern, and what kinds of pleasure it can give us now. Evans the man seems to have been an Anglophilic snob and a coward. His final two decadeswhich he spent as a professor at Yalehave already been chronicled in Jerry Thompsons poignant The Last Years of Walker Evans; as those years didnt produce Evanss best work, their absence from Mellows manuscript hardly reduces his achievement. 150 b&w photos. (May)