Walker Evans, Sherrie Levine, and the Politics of Photography

Introduction: Photography, Power, and Reproduction

During the Great Depression, Walker Evans worked primarily as a photojournalist and documentarian, using the medium of photography to capture American life in visual detail. Many of Evans's most famous photographs appear in his book, co-written with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book was funded in part by grants issued by New Deal programs that the Roosevelt administration designed to address systemic poverty. Photojournalism was integral to achieving the goals of the New Deal, which is why Evans and Agee were able to compile their historiography.

In his photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs, Evans depicts the primary purpose of his research: to offer proof of the effects of income disparity and economic exploitation. In 1981, Sherrie Levine reproduced several of Walker Evans's images, including that of Allie Mae Burroughs. Reproducing the photographs transformed the original images — not necessarily in terms of content or form, but in terms of their politics and semantics. The original photograph situated the photographer as an actor empowered by the state against the subject. Thus, Evans engaged in "othering," even if he intended to communicate the abject poverty of American sharecroppers. Levine redefines the role of photography, divorces the medium from the message, and opens the image up for ongoing discursive action.

Evans's Portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs

In the photograph, Allie Mae Burroughs stands against what is most likely a barn wall. The image is a true portrait, capturing the head and bust of the subject. Her dark hair is parted to one side and pulled back. Burroughs is thin; both her cheekbones and collarbones are visible. Her brow is noticeably furrowed and her lips are pursed. With those pursed lips and frowning eyes, Burroughs appears tense, concerned, and possibly even angry. The shape of her lips also suggests that she may have lost most of her teeth.

Even if a viewer had no idea that the photograph was taken in Alabama during the Great Depression, it would be apparent that this is a portrait of a poor woman. When the image is fully decontextualized — as it is in the Levine reproduction — it does not entirely lose its documentary power, because the content of the image possesses a universal and timeless quality: it conveys the human condition, including salient elements like poverty and oppression. Yet most viewers of Levine's work knew as much about the context and content of the photograph as Evans's viewers knew about his. For Levine, the image of an image becomes a commentary not just on poverty and oppression, but also on the potential for journalism to become an exploitative medium.

Levine's Reflexive Commentary on Photography

Levine creates a reflexive discourse with her work, using photography essentially to comment on itself as a medium. Photography is the tool that can demonstrate why it is a powerful and potentially politically dangerous one — capable of denoting systems of power between the observer and the observed. Evans possessed a tremendous amount of power over his subject, while Allie Mae Burroughs lacked this power entirely. She exists in his work simply as a token emblem of a generic "poverty" or the concept of the Great Depression.

Moreover, Evans's career was clearly advanced by his work photographing sharecroppers. Levine shows that by profiting from the poor — even indirectly and with good intentions — Evans is somewhat complicit in the capitalist power structures that gave rise to the Depression in the first place. This is not to say that Evans failed to achieve the ultimate political goal of documentary photography. In fact, the documentary evidence he produced did raise public awareness to a degree that could not have happened otherwise. Photography as documentation and forensic evidence can expose a reality in order to create meaningful social or political change.

Conclusion: Appropriation, Exploitation, and Art

Sherrie Levine's Untitled / After Walker Evans 4 was produced decades after the Evans original. Levine ironically exploits the photojournalist in the same way the photojournalist exploited the sharecroppers during the Great Depression. In so doing, Levine devalues and de-commodifies Evans's work. Yet Levine also participates in the process of "duplicability, seriality, and copying" that refers the product back to its original form (Phillips, 1982, p. 27). In her reproduction, Levine transforms photojournalism into art and becomes a photojournalist herself in the process, as she comments on the form and function of both documentary photography and the act of capturing a subjective reality.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. 1977. "Rhetoric of the Image."

Phillips, Christopher. 1982. "The Judgment Seat of Photography." October, Vol. 22, pp. 27–63.