Assignment 1 - Research

 Walker Evans

    Walker Evens was an American photographer born in St. Louis Missouri in 1903. He is known as one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. Born and raised in a wealthy family, he went to various schools due to his father's work. Interested in literature, he quit Williams College to pursue his passion and started working at the New York Public Library. Later, he spent a year in Paris perfecting his French and started writing short stories and nonfiction essays. Then, returned to America in hopes of becoming a writer but as time went he progressively started to express his ideas through a lens (Met Museum). As Evans once said that he wanted his work to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent" (Met Museum). He was known for his photography documenting the American social reality during the Great Depression in black and white exposing the poverty and hardships encountered by his country. His pictures from that period were notably black and white which comes to accentuate the emotion of depression. Moreover, he photographed subjects such as portraits, architecture, and urban streets which were generally photographed centred in the frame and which accentuated the feeling of desperation.

                 

                  Allie Mae Burroughs, 1935

Abandoned store, 1935

                               

Sources:

Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Walker Evans (1903–1975).” Metmuseum.org, Department of Photographs, Oct. 2004, www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm.

Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Walker Evans.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art - Special Exhibitions, Metropolitan Museum of Art, web.archive.org/web/20080314191734/www.metmuseum.org/special/walkerevans/learn.htm. 

James VanDerZee

    James VanDerZee is an American photographer born in Lenox, Massachusetts. From the age of fourteen, he started photographing people around him such as his friends and family and never put down the camera afterwards. In fact, after he moved to New York in 1909, he started photographing the everyday life in Harlem during the Harlem renaissance as he captured the liveliness of the growing middle class in the neighbourhood. VanDerZee's focused on indoor portrait photographs of friends and family, schoolchildren, church groups, weddings, funerals, celebrities, etc. carefully composed to share the dreams and aspirations for self-determination and racial pride of the inhabitants of Harlem. Moreover, he pictured the subjects centred and used props such as architectural elements, backdrops, and costumes "to tell a story" (McCollum). He also developped photo montage tehcniques such as double exposure to retouch the negatives and enrich the narative of his pictures.

                            

                            Wedding Day, 1924

Evening Attire, 1922

Sources:

Everett, Gwen, and Lynda Roscoe Hartigan. “James VanDerZee.” Smithsonian American Art Museum, americanart.si.edu/artist/james-vanderzee-6593.

McCollum, Sean. “James Van Der Zee: Documenter of 1920s Harlem.” Scholastic, www.scholastic.com/teachers/articles/teaching-content/james-van-der-zee-documenter-1920s-harlem/.