Home»All Photographs»Projects»The "Walker Evans" Project

This is an experiment in street photography. In most street and documentary photography, the photographer goes looking for especially interesting people and situations to shoot. The approach I will take here is to settle in a particular spot or walk a pre-determined route, and photograph whoever comes my way.This project is inspired by something I read about Walker Evans.Between 1938 and 1941, Evans made a series of photographs in the New York subways. He hid a 35mm camera under his coat, rigged with a remote shutter release, and surreptitiously made pictures of people sitting opposite him. Al selection of these images were later collected in a book titled Many Are Called.In the late 1940s, Evans made a series of street portraits in Detroit (published in Fortune magazine as "Labor Anonymous", and in Chicago (part of the Fortune essay "Chicago: A Photographic Exploration"). For these photos, Evans held a twin-lens Rollei at chest level and took pictures of passers-by with no attempt at all to conceal what he was doing.What struck me was that Evans said of the Detroit and Chicago pictures that he had used "the same approach as the Subway pictures", despite what at first seems the huge difference of his subject's knowing or not knowing what he was doing.I concluded that the essential thing that made these "the same approach" for Evans was the element of randomness--the fact that he let the subjects present themselves rather than seeking out what was "interesting".So, with full knowledge of my presumption and pretension, I've decided on this experiment. I hope you will find the results interesting.