Customer Reviews

Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection

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The only other book about this great photographer that is as comprehensive as this excellent one is Jerry Thompson's 'Walker Evans at Work', published in 1982, with 745 photos. It's worth saying though that Keller's is not a portfolio type book with large photos but a comprehensive overview of his work presented as 1121 postcard to playing card sized images.

The five chapters relate to significant years in Evans career from 1926 to 1974. They start with an introduction putting the photos in context followed by the images. Each has a very detailed caption: subject; date; size; marks and inscriptions; references. Nicely, I thought, none of the photos have been cropped, so that many of them have black strips or areas of white photographic paper, exactly as Evans would have handled them from the enlarger. A fascinating chapter (1938-1941) covers the New York subway project which made his book 'Many are called'. Here you can see 221 photos including many alternative shots of passengers. Images for 'American Photos' and FSA work (1935-1938) have 169 shots.

Don't be put off by the small size of these photos, they are beautifully printed 250 screen duotones on good matt art paper, also included are thirty-one color images, twenty-five from a projected Fortune photo-essay on street furniture taken between 1952 and 1954 and six Polaroid's from 1973 and 1974. The back of the book has an excellent bibliography presented in year order with frequent comments from the author (which I found particularly useful) to the book details.

I thought this was a quite remarkable book because it is so comprehensive and different from the other books I have of Evans work. These are portfolio format titles and the best is probably Walker Evans the Hungry Eye, with a selection of large well printed photos but go for the hardback edition, the paperback is too small.

***SEE SOME INSIDE PAGES by clicking 'customer images' under the cover.

A quality production from the Getty. Big, solid, square hardback, cloth over boards with a sewn binding. Heavy stock. 5.5 pounds.

3 Appendices, Index, and a 20 page Bibliography.