Deutsch
English
Background information
"Walker EVANS is one of the 'heroes' of American photography today. The rather difficult loner and admirer of Gustave Flaubert originally wanted to become a writer. It was only towards the end of the 1920s, after a year of study in Paris, that he began to take up photography seriously. The Great Depression after the stock market crash of 1929 and Roosevelt's 'New Deal' aid programs for the impoverished rural population finally offered him the opportunity and, above all, the motives to test his artistic ambitions on a socially explosive task: What Walker EVANS presented to the federal authorities after two years of work in the 'rural slums' of the southern states was to prove in the long term to be America's most significant contribution to social documentary photography of the 20th century. It was above all Walker EVANS' relationship to literature that prompted Svetlana Alpers - one of the most renowned art historians in the USA - to take up photography for the first time in her career.
Content
This major study of Walker EVANS by Svetlana Alpers traces the phenomenon of a work whose creator claimed that photography was the most literary of the visual arts. The afterword and translation are by Wolfgang Kemp, winner of the Sigmund Freud Prize 2018." (Publisher's text, © Schirmer / Mosel verlag, 2021)
Additional information
Hardcover edition with dust jacket, 320 pages, around fifty illustrations, 23.5 x 15 cm, German-language edition.