[electronic resource]

Walker EvansNo Politics

---

"NO POLITICS whatever." Walker Evans made this emphatic declaration in 1935, the year he began work for FDR's Resettlement Administration. Evans insisted that his photographs of tenant farmers and their homes, breadlines, and the unemployed should be treated as "pure record." The American photographer's statements have often been dismissed. In Walker Evans: No Politics, Stephanie Schwartz challenges us to engage with what it might mean, in the 1930s and at the height of the Great Depression, to refuse to work politically. Offering close readings of Evans's numerous commissions, including his contribution to Carleton Beals's anti-imperialist tract, The Crime of Cuba (1933), this book is a major departure from the standard accounts of Evans's work and American documentary. Documentary, Schwartz reveals, is not a means of being present—or being "political." It is a practice of record making designed to distance its maker from the "scene of the crime." That crime, Schwartz argues, is not just the Depression; it is the processes of Americanization reshaping both photography and politics in the 1930s. Historicizing documentary, this book reimagines Evans and his legacy—the complexities of claiming "no politics."

---

Availability

No copy data

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

-

Publisher

: .,

Collation

1 online resource (320 pages)

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781477329856

Classification

-

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

-

Subject(s)

Electronic books
Photography

Specific Detail Info

-

Statement of Responsibility

-

Other version/related

File Attachment

Comments

---

You must be logged in to post a comment