"NO POLITICS whatever." Walker Evans made this emphatic declaration in 1935, the year he began work for FDR's Resettlement Administration. Evans insisted that his photographs of tenant farmers and their homes, breadlines, and the unemployed should be treated as "pure record." The American photographer's statements have often been dismissed. In Walker Evans: No Politics, Stephanie Schwartz challenges us to engage with what it might mean, in the 1930s and at the height of the Great Depression, to refuse to work politically.

Offering close readings of Evans's numerous commissions, including his contribution to Carleton Beals's anti-imperialist tract, The Crime of Cuba (1933), this book is a major departure from the standard accounts of Evans's work and American documentary. Documentary, Schwartz reveals, is not a means of being present-or being "political." It is a practice of record making designed to distance its maker from the "scene of the crime." That crime, Schwartz argues, is not just the Depression; it is the processes of Americanization reshaping both photography and politics in the 1930s. Historicizing documentary, this book reimagines Evans and his legacy-the complexities of claiming "no politics."

About the Author
Stephanie Schwartz is a lecturer in the Department of History of Art at University College London.

Reviews
[Walker Evans] is a timely and insightful analysis of documentary photography through the complexities of Walker Evans' refusal to work politically. Schwartz illuminates numerous aspects of Evans' life and practice, including detailed studies of certain of his photobooks. In an era in which questions of representation and 'making history' are fundamental to our understanding of the world around us, this book is essential reading. * photo-eye, "2020 Favorite Photobooks" *
[Walker Evans] succeeds in reconsidering the work and legacy of Evans within a vast constellation of photographers and writers. It is a rich and nuanced work for students of American photography and documentary made during the twentieth century, especially those interested in politics and material history. In a time when everything is politics, the search for apolitical action is a particularly helpful tool for interrogating our own ideas about the topic. * H-Socialisms *
[Schwartz] takes an approach that honors Evans's own attitude toward photography: 'a mode of work in which refusing politics was the only way to work politically'...Plentiful black-and-white photographs are placed to maximize Schwartz's argument, using Evans's own words. Although Evans scholarship is a crowded field, Schwartz's book offers a thoughtful perspective on a complicated artist. Recommended. * CHOICE *
Schwartz does not construct her own Walker to analyse...but focusses more directly on his work itself. In a way, she looks closely at a thick visual slice of him instead of trying to digest his complex self as a whole...Schwartz challenges the reader with detailed studies of some of [Evans'] photobooks as well as modern photography's most canonical texts. These raise issues of representation and, more critically, how documentaries serve to create history via visual narration. * Visual Studies *



Book Information
ISBN 9781477320624
Author Stephanie Schwartz
Format Hardback
Page Count 320
Imprint University of Texas Press
Publisher University of Texas Press
Weight(grams) 853g
Dimensions(mm) 254mm * 178mm * 48mm