Melancholy Realism: Walker Evans's Resistance to Meaning

"It is characteristic of philosophical writing," wrote Walter Benjamin, in the opening sentence of a book he was misled enough to hope would bring him academic preferment, "that it must continually confront the question of representation" (27). We might equally substitute "historical" here for the adjective "philosophical," though no doubt it will be insisted that this view is itself dated. Be that as it may, "the question of representation" survives both the 1920s and the 1970s, if not as the slogan of a particular project, then as the marker of what, like some colonial administrator, Paul de Man once called "local difficulties"; local difficulties, one might add, that are only too apt to turn into awkward events—the events of representation that compel a shift, as de Man put it, "from historical definition to the problematics of reading" (ix). The difficulty, then, is how to get a handle on these events, even while we also have to worry about how they handle us—their subjects, that is, even those who cannot reconcile themselves to being in their grip.

What concerns me here is the photographic event: not just the production of meaning at a specific moment, in a specific cultural field, but above all the relation the photograph is driven to establish to meaning and to the possibility of photographic narration. The moment is that of the second New Deal in the United States: precisely a moment at which new technologies of photomechanical reproduction enabled a further quantum leap in the proliferation and social dispersion of photographic images, crossing a threshold that marked the emergence of a new economy—visual, social, and political. The status of photography in this economy constituted a particular knot, threading together those dreams of transparency, efficiency, and accelerated exchange that marked the instrumentalization of photographic meaning, in social administration as in commercialized communications, in the documentary archive as in the photojournalistic picture file. The social saturation of the New Deal and the market saturation of the New Media: what space for response did they allow, other than immersion, subjection, and seduction? What recourse remained to the subject in the face of their new calls to emergence? What prospects might there be for resisting or evading their new machineries and their demands for the efficient delivery and receipt of meaning? This is the problem of Walker Evans with his camera in the mid-1930s—the problem of the character of his stubborn refusals, his famous "lassitude," his inertia, his "negative personal magnetism," and what Lincoln Kirstein irritably called "the skimmed decadence of so much of his work" (qtd. in Mellow 142). ¹

Before we can approach this, however, we must understand something of the economy of meaning in which Evans had to find a way to use his camera. Where to begin with this? At the barber's shop, perhaps, with Roland Barthes. But, there, we may find ourselves out of luck, at least as regards our choice of magazine. ²

Laying hands on a copy of the 15 February 1937 issue of Life, with its frame-filling face of Japanese Premier General Senjuro Hayashi, was surprisingly difficult in the winter of 1937 (Fig. 1). Surprising, because more than 650,000 copies had been produced. But this was nowhere near enough to meet demand.

When Life had been in the planning stage in August 1936, a modest circulation of two hundred thousand had been projected for the new picture magazine (Wainwright 32). ³ By the time of its first issue on 23 November, however, it already had 235,000 charter subscriptions and the print order had been raised to 466,000, with more than two hundred thousand copies earmarked for newsstands (63, 74). ⁴ At ten cents a time, these sold out on the first day and dealers pleaded to increase their orders by as much as five times. For the more than three hundred advertisers who had committed to Life before the date of the...