Walker Evans and Renewals of American Documentary

Recording from November 2, 2020, online dialogue titled “Walker Evans and Renewals of American Documentary.”
In this dialogue organized by the Terra Foundation, Stephanie Schwartz (Associate Professor in American Art, University College London) and Quentin Bajac (Director, Jeu de Paume) will address the legacy of Walker Evans (1903-75) and the renewals of American documentary from the 1960s to the present.
Expanding from her recently published book Walker Evans: No Politics (University of Texas Press, 2020), Stephanie Schwartz will take up the issue of “remakes” as concerns both how the photographer revisited his work throughout his long career, as well as how Evans and documentary reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s through the work of Allan Sekula (1951-2013). Schwartz will address the multiple temporalities of documentary and influence.
Quentin Bajac, curator of the survey exhibition Stephen Shore (Museum of Modern Art, 2017-18), will focus on the fascination that Shore (b. 1947) has always had for Evans’s work. “If I were to say in the photographic world the one person whom I used as a springboard for ideas and a resource to learn from, it was Walker Evans,” Shore asserted in the New York Times in 2004. More than an influence, Shore prefers to characterize his relationship with Evans in another vein, closer to a sentiment (“a kinship”) or a way of being (“the same constitutional type”). Bajac will address the many different facets that this relationship has taken throughout Shore’s career.
Together, the speakers will address and trouble the issue of “influence,” querying what it means for photography and its histories and thinking about the larger question of what Evans and American documentary might mean today.

[@johnpeterson7264]

Unfortunate portrayal of Evan’s great legacy

[@DarkAngelEU]

I always find it weird how speakers say "Of course,..." , "Naturally,..." , use these sentences that make it seem as if what they're talking about is already known to the audience, which makes me wonder why they're even talking about it on a stage in the first place. Are they assuming only highly educated people listen to these kind of lectures? Or are they so insecure that they want to make it seem as if they're part of the in-crowd, excluding the audience from an inclusive conversation? Either way, it feels rather snobbish and it's the first time I'm able to put my finger why I'm so annoyed anytime I join these kind of events. I did like their dialogue though, besides that single grain of sand grinding my teeth. It's very interesting to notice Stephen Shore as an archaeologist, considering his initial work was more Pop Art than when he adopted the large format, colour film approach. He became more sophisticated, and that ties in quite well with how older photographers tried to re-identify themselves in the sixties. He shed the rock'n'roll irony for something that speaks for itself and can be remembered as being more reflective to its era. Both Evans and Cartier-Bresson later admitting they actually wanted to be artists, but weren't allowed to because photography wasn't considered an expressive artform by then, is in itself an ironic twist considering how much influence they had by doing exactly what was expected of them, and also quite ironic considering that, if Shore knew about this, took this as a queue to simply follow his voice and shed the edgy attitude for something more authentic. They grow in the same manner, but one points one way and the other points back around.

[@Dtynw1]

This is some boring shit that Walker would despise...

[@hokeypokeypo]

Yep.