American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White (review)

The issue of what exactly constitutes documentary photography forms the backbone of American Modern, a cohesive and insightful study of three of the most influential documentary photographers to come out of the 1930s. The authors of American Modern: Documentary Photography of Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White set out to demonstrate, through a series of in depth case studies of the work of Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, that while there is no clear cut definition of what exactly constitutes documentary photography, a series of shared concerns can be seen to illuminate the influence and creation of a “documentary” style. In this respect, the book ambitiously seeks to use the respective practices of the photographers as a way to articulate some of the wider political, artistic, and social concerns of the 1930s. These concerns, translated partly into an abiding respect and reverence for the working people and landscapes of a rapidly changing America are nonetheless tempered by an anxiety regarding the ramifications of industrialization and urbanization on the more folkloric and vernacular aspects of everyday working life. By linking these concerns through the very different visions of Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White, the question of what constitutes photographic representation is likewise brought to the fore. What are the perils and complications of establishing a typology of America during the Depression when the very nature of American identity was under duress? And what images, in this context, remain relevant to American cultural identities as we perceive them now? Using the more iconic imagery produced for and by the Farm Security Administration, Fortune magazine, and Walker Evans and James Agee’s famous Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Weissman, May, and Corwin, examine the representation of both urban and rural environments through the theme of labor and production. The labor of the subjects represented is obviously key to this examination, but the book’s genuine strength lies in its attention to the labor of the photographers. For all three photographers, straddling the line between corporate or industrial and artistic integrity was of paramount concern.

In the first essay, Weissman, a professor of modern and contemporary art history, presents Abbott’s documentary style as part of a larger democratic impetus, an impetus spurred on and articulated by her partner and collaborator Elizabeth McCausland, a much overlooked critic and articulator of the importance of creating a genuinely vernacular form of American photography. Weissman’s underlying argument is that Abbott’s very measured and architectural photography is equally about the laboring body, the body at times absent and at times peripheral in her more formally constructed shots of New York. She stresses the ways in which McCausland understood Abbott’s imagery as an attempt to create a great “democratic book,” a book of balanced text and image, able to create a dialogue both within the work and with its audience.

May, Assistant Curator of Photographs at the Amon Carter Museum, explores the work of Evans within the context of his seminal one man show in 1938 at the newly formed Museum of Modern American Art, American Photographs, in which Evans—not unlike Abbott—used a discernibly modernist eye to reconfigure the idea of a genuinely democratic vision of America. May argues that Evans’s intense desire to establish himself as a modern artist as well as his at times patronizing articulation of artist’s rights illuminate the self-referential and self-reflexive nature of his work as an attempt to simultaneously comment on the fraught nature of documentary practice itself. Highly informative and succinct in the way she brings together the history of how Evans was “produced” and indeed produced himself as a canonical American photographer, May’s essay treads on familiar ground while still managing to contextualize the accompanying images in illuminating ways. Nonetheless, the idea that Evans provided a less instructive strain of documentary photograph than that of Abbott or Bourke-White also has...