American Photographs
“ ‘American Photographs’ would go down in history as [Evans’s] signal achievement, establishing him as an artist and the very notion of documentary photography as an art.” -Belinda Rathbone, Walker Evans: A Biography
“Walker Evans’s photographs helped define, document, (and sometimes invent) both the cultural and physical landscape of America in the twentieth century. More than any other photographer before him, Evans relished the anonymity of his camera and its reflective, detached quality... His vision and style, crystal clear, uncompromising, makes his photographs some of the most recognizable in the history of American twentieth century photography, and the arbiter and documenter of a peculiarly introspective American decade, the 1930s” -Andy Crank, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography
FIRST EDITION of Evans’s masterpiece, “at the top of the pantheon” of American photobooks.
“American Photographs holds a well-deserved place at the top of the pantheon, and should be studied assiduously by any photographer attempting the tricky business of compiling a coherent photobook. It is a complex, elliptical, hugely ambitious work, exemplifying all the qualities that Evans demanded from serious photography...
“It constitutes a document of 1930s America so persuasive that John Szarkowski has remarked: ‘It is difficult to know now with certainty whether Walker Evans recorded the America of his youth, or invented it... American Photographs remains a great work of art, for it showed us all -- including the photographer himself -- just what might be accomplished by the photobook” (Parr and Badger, The Photobook, Vol. I.). Roth 101.
New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1938. Quarto, original black cloth with paper spine label, original dust jacket. With errata slip; without the extremely rare belly-band. Book fine, dust jacket with mild toning (usual with this jacket), a tiny bit of edgewear, and small spot of discoloration at base of front panel. An exceptionally good copy of a book that is notoriously difficult to find in collectible condition.
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