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"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."