As photographic technology advanced—cameras became more portable and film more sensitive to light, requiring shorter exposure times—people were no longer required to pose for pictures. In an effort to capture candid images of people in public places, Walker Evans affixed a right angle viewfinder to his camera to make it look as if he was pointing it off to the side rather than directly at his subjects. For his Subway Portraits, he went even further and concealed his camera by painting its shiny chrome parts black and hiding it under his topcoat, with only its lens peeking out between two buttons. He rigged its shutter to a cable release, whose chord snaked down his sleeve and into the palm of his hand, which he kept buried in his pocket. As a result, these portraits show people in unguarded moments.
Seeing Through Photographs online course, Coursera, 2016
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Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975 368 works onlineIn a review of Walker Evans’s first career retrospective , critic Hilton Kramer noted, “Our experience of an Evans photograph may begin with an admiration for its design and a delight in its subject; it ends, however, with an overwhelming sense of the photographer’s own unmistakable temperament.
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