Avedon and Evans - Portraits of the Country

Résumé du document

Walker Evans (1903-1975) is often said to the best American documentary photographer of the century. His most important and famous work was his depiction of American rural life during the Great Depression. Commissioned by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935, he meticulously documented the life of the rural poor in Southern States in the midst of the economic and social crisis. Forty years later, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) embarked upon a six-year project during which he travelled through the American West, camera in hand, aspiring to depict the life of simple and poverty-stricken people and to show how desperate American countryside people were, far removed from the White House or from Hollywood. Both photographers dedicated an important part of their life to travels through the American countryside and portrayed an endangered America. Both used photography, and unexpectedly the same camera, an 8 x 10 Camera as a medium to express their concern. However, I will show in this paper that a careful comparison of their works demonstrates how different they were, not only in their methods and techniques, but also in their conception of photography: while Evans photographed artifacts, objects and places, following the tradition of documentary photography, Avedon photographed people, in the tradition of fashion photography. Therefore I will show how they achieved their common goal in different ways.

Extraits

[...] So is his portrait of Boyd Fortin (1979; fig. symbolic of the harshness of life for youngsters, working in hard conditions. According to Faberman, the curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Cantor Center for Visual Arts, approach monumentalized ordinary people; they were the antithesis of what was the common view of the West at the time”. Therefore, Avedon succeeded in his two goals: on the one hand to give a strong meaning and a broad impact to each portrait, and on the other hand to give America a new and truthful vision of itself. [...]

[...] Both attempted to represent a fact that is omnipresent but invisible: American countryside despair. But Evans and Avedon used antagonistic mediums: Evans used objects and places as symbols of the Great Depression and the threatened American culture while Avedon used people to show American West's desperation and misery. Two different ways, one same goal: they both portrayed society, but through two different—but interrelated—components: culture and people. This comparison shows how documentary photography and art photography are linked and able to efficiently serve the same purpose: denouncing a problem within society. [...]

[...] Even though he took portraits for other assignments (e.g. his famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs (1935; fig. realized as part of reportage in a sharecropper family, for Fortune magazine), his series of photographs for the FSA includes very little portraits, often emphasizing less on the raw human feelings than on the conditions and the context of the subject. Trying to depict an authentic expression of America, he focuses on objects and places. He meticulously selected facts, with a subtle appreciation of their meaning or evocative power, to show their essence, relying on the honesty of the camera (underlined by Edward Weston in his article Seeing Photographically). [...]

[...] How did he manage to focus on people and not on their environment? He reinvented portraiture conventions: instead of taking straight photography of everyday life scenes, like other photographers such as Robert Frank, Avedon decided to isolate people from their environment. To isolate his subjects, he photographed them in front of a white background and let the black frame appear on the picture. Nothing can distract the viewer's eye, which is imprisoned in the frame and focusing on the subject: the sitter is alone and centered in the frame, usually staring at the camera, making him communicate with the viewer, as argued by Catherine Lutz & Jane Collins in The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes. [...]

[...] Richard Avedon: a true interest in the people Richard Avedon, on the contrary, focused exclusively on people. Wishing to show the America, both desperate and hard working, he chose to photograph simple people coping with their harsh everyday life, like factory workers, truckers, miners, drifters and prisoners. Avedon's interest was always in the person, never in his living place or his working place. What he wanted to capture was the essence of his subjects, and yet he explained that he wanted people to “become in a sense symbolic of themselves” in his portraits. [...]