Let Us Know Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans, Carbon Pigment vs. Silver Gelatin.

Untitled Negro Quarter, Mississippi, 1936, Walker Evans
9 x 12 in.
Carbon Pigment Print

Let Us Know Praise Famous Men, Photos by Walker Evans & Text by James Agee, was by my side for much of my cross-country trip. There was a time I reached out to friends and family, and to a few photographers who had undergone similar stints on the road, for advice during my stay in Boonville, N. Carolina. A friend who would later give me some of the best advice in the last few weeks of the journey, suggested that I read Famous Men just before I left Missouri for NC.

I believe it was Evans who suggests (in the forward) reading the first few chapters at night, and by candle light, if possible. During the time I read the first half of the book I was camping in a semi-secluded part of the town park, in NC. I didn't know many people at this point, so I spent much of my nights reading by headlamp. In "Part One, A Country Letter," around page 51, Agee goes on to write one of the most moving paragraphs (and 20 pages) I have ever read. It was a pleasure to have read this while being outside and alone, and with only a faint and flickering headlamp by my side.

"The light in this room is of a lamp. Its flame in the glass is of the dry, silent and famished delicateness of the latest lateness of the night, and of such ultimate, such holiness of silence and peace that all on earth and within extremest remembrance seems suspended upon it in perfection as upon reflective water: and I feel that if I can by utter quietness succeed in not disturbing this silence, in not so much as touching this plain of water, I can tell you anything within realm of God, whatsoever it may be, that I wish to tell you, and that what so ever it may be, you will not be able to help but understand it."

I've been to Bond Street Gallery in Brooklyn twice since the Evans show opened. The images are a mix between digital ink-jet (or Carbon Pigment Print) and traditional Silver Prints. It was exciting to see the two mediums in the same space; being someone who prefers to stay as far away from both the darkroom and digital printer, I am still unsure of the final process that I will use for the Boonville work: I hate the dark; and the digital Pigment print is looking amazing and even better then silver in some cases, and it is much easier, accurate and cost effective to make editions on the go, rather then all at once. Evans himself hated the dark, and was not afraid of new technologies. Quoting a NY Times article about Evans from August, 2006:

In other words, the image produced by the camera, whether it’s a negative or a digital file, is only the matrix for the work of art. It is not the work itself... Digital technology has not introduced manipulation into this universe; it has only multiplied the opportunities for mischief.

I dawdle over this familiar ground because the digitally produced prints of classic Walker Evans photographs [...] are so seductive and luxurious — velvety, full of rich detail, poster-size in a few cases and generally cinematic — that they raise some basic issues about the nature of photography.

For starters they suggest a simple question, whether luxury and richness are apt qualities for pictures of Depression-era tenant farmers in the American South. These are, I must say, almost uncomfortably beautiful. In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” where Evans first published many of these photographs in 1941, James Agee, his collaborator, wrote that the book might best have been issued on newsprint to suit the simple and honest character of its subjects. Photography compromises its own value, Agee thought, when it becomes pretentious.

For his part Evans notoriously disdained darkrooms and only haphazardly supervised the making of his own prints. But he adopted the new Polaroid SX-70 camera when it came along in 1973, indicating that he wasn’t averse to new technologies; and with his negatives, like most photographers, he occasionally burned in or dodged out passages to make the pictures look more the way he wanted them to, which they couldn’t otherwise. To a negative of the famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the sharp-faced Alabama tenant farmer’s wife, he attached instructions for exposing furrows in her brow. Adjusting the exposure was the technique he had at hand, a crude one compared to digital technology.