"Walker Evans"
Photofile series from Thames & Hudson
2007

Most photography books, the ones most likely to make it to the discerning eye's shelf, are large and expensive. Sometimes very large and very expensive. So it is nice to come across a smart book, well-done with excellent reproduction, that is priced right and well-made, such as "Walker Evans."

The Walker Evans and James Agee collaboration "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" is very well-known, as is Walker's work for the Farm Security Administration and Fortune magazine. His unswerving photographs of Depression-era tenant farmers are stark and unnerving, as are his documents of their living conditions without the dwellers. Each is a portrait of life as stillness.

This book has that and more. A variety of beautiful images, people and things bring forth the past with power and grace: studies of buildings and their interiors, candid portraits taken without the subjects' knowledge, sign details and urbanscapes. Flawless compositions, distractions weeded from the photographic earth, seem to come with ease to Evans and are evident in all the work represented. Evans does not waste space with unnecessary elements or noise, which might divert the eye needlessly from the message.

This handsome book contains a well-coordinated representation of his work up to 1946. After that, five photographs represent the remaining years to his death in 1975. Even with the 29-year gap, the publication is a very good Evans primer. The swell price, listed at $15.95, is more than worth it for the bonanza of information in the introduction by Gilles Mora, an independent French curator and author of "Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye." Detailed and to the point, the introduction is worth double for anyone interested in the minutea of photographers.