Walker Evans exhibition

I’m looking forward to going to see the Walker Evans exhibition at the Photographers Gallery (15th May–12th July) at some point this week. Although Evans is best known for his work documenting America’s rural south during the 1930s (for the Farm Security Administration, and his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), this exhibition also features colour Polaroids taken in the 70s, near the end of his life. Should be really interesting. The exhibition of Evans’ work is accompanied by an exhibition by a photographer I’m not familiar with, Frank Breuer, whose series Warehouses and Logos “depicts the presence of global corporations in the European landscape”. Sounds like my cup of tea too.

Evans’ work has long been an influential favourite of mine, and led me to discover the work of artist Lewis Baltz. Baltz emerged in the late 70s as part of the New Topographic movement, and his photographs offer stark, graphic depictions of man’s influence on the landscape — in some respects the polar opposite of someone like Ansel Adams, but in some ways very similar — quite a few of Baltz’s photos are online at the George Eastman House web site. A biography of Baltz at Princeton University Art Museum states that he “recognized a shift in landscape photography away from a heroic vision of the American wilderness toward the often banal character of a growing suburbia”.

Baltz’s photographs in “New Topographics” consisted entirely of images of an industrial warehouse complex in Southern California, several of which are on view in this exhibition. Tightly composed photographs of blank concrete walls and prefabricated buildings, the images convey a sense of the claustrophobia and anonymity of urban life.

In Nevada, Baltz’s next major effort, a new narrative style emerged. Tracing the incursion of housing developments into the desert valleys surrounding Reno, Nevada, Baltz alternated panoramic views of the horizon with photographs of construction sites, trailer parks, and city streets to show an open landscape slowly being devoured. Nevada was the first step toward a pictorial methodology of intensely detailed mapping that Baltz was to explore over the next decade, culminating in his epic project, Candlestick Point. Photographed between 1984 and 1988, the series explored in grim detail a landscape scraped bare of almost all natural references, pinned between the airport and the ballpark just south of San Francisco.

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