I was introduced to the work of Walker Evans through the book he did with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee, the journalist, Evans, the photographer. It is a long book -- the story of three tenant farmer families with fantastically lyrical writing and raw photographs.
Yes the photographs take up likely 20 or 25 pages to the text's 250 (numbers estimated; the book is in New York while I am not right now...), but they are clearly evens. Evans himself said so:
"The photographs are not illustrative. They, and the text, are coequal, mutually independent, and fully collaborative. By their fewness, and by the importance of the reader’s eye, this will be misunderstood by most of that minority which does not wholly ignore it. In the interests, however, of the history and future of photography, that risk seems irrelevant, and this flat statement necessary."
Of course he is right, but not just in this work, but all work.
The cliche is that a picture is worth a thousand words. I don't buy it -- though I do think things only become cliches because of their inherent truth. But these pictures are worth so much more than words which, in effect, is wordless: emotion.
Photographs complete the eavesdropping picture, filling in the details. Eye contact is the fasted way to raw emotion, and photography is the only way to capture eye contact free from the deterioration of time.
As I work at The JazzLoft Project, which includes the tapes and photographs of Eugene Smith, a photographer who always had a reel-to-reel going and film in his camera, the power of photography shows itself even more to me.
I wish I had the camera for it. I wish I had the eye for it. For now, I'm better than most in my family, but worse than all who call themselves photographers -- and many who don't. But I guess I'll just appreciate the art that others do, and more importantly, not hesitate to stare every now and then.
After all, it's the only way to learn something.
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