ยฉ Walker Evans
Where a Project Dies
A project doesn’t die where you think it dies. It doesn’t die in the opening images, which almost always hold, those are the ones you picked to get your foot in the door. It dies three quarters of the way through, when the reader has stopped seducing himself with the promise of the opening and starts asking what you are still saying. If the book gives way at that point, whatever comes after will be read through that collapse.
As an editor I see it often. Drafts arrive with the first twenty images strong, a hurried ending, and in between the emptiness where the project gave up. The ending decides what will stay in memory.
Walker Evans’s American Photographs is the book that taught American photography to think of a book as one whole work. Published by MoMA in 1938, eighty-seven images in two sections, fifty and thirty-seven, with Lincoln Kirstein’s essay at the back. Evans opens with the faces of sharecroppers, miners, veterans, and the places where those bodies exist: barbershops, houses, painted signs. Then he lets the people go. The second part becomes an inventory of architecture, factory towns, country churches, facades. And it closes with Tin Relic.
A piece of stamped tin, a fragment of early twentieth-century architectural ornament, photographed as a still life. No one inside. No street. A residue. The book had already shown one. The second part had opened with Stamped Tin Relic, 1929. Evans bookends the section with an ornament torn from a wall. After eighty-six images of bodies and facades, the last is an abandoned thing.
That is not a decorative ending. It is a judgement. It tells the reader: everything you have seen will leave this behind, an ornamental trace torn from its building. Evans does not explain it. He puts it at the bottom, and the bottom speaks.
When you close your next project, ask yourself which image you want the reader to carry away when they are done looking. Not the strongest. The one that says what you were really doing. If you do not have it, the project is not finished. It has only reached the bottom.
Marco Savarese
Editor-in-Chief
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marco Savarese
Marco Savarese is Editor-in-Chief at Eyeshot, the independent publisher he founded in Italy in 2018. He spends most of his year reading portfolios, judging the Open Call, and editing the magazine catalogue. The reading desk is open, and he takes one-to-one Professional Reviews from photographers working seriously on long-term projects.
Who Finishes Your Photograph
NOTE #210. A photo isn’t finished until it survives to where people see it. Paul Strand chose hand photogravure for Photographs of Mexico so the printed copy kept the tonal weight of his prints. Protect the tone to the end, or the worst medium decides for you.
What the Dark Does
NOTE #209. A face lost in shadow reads as underexposed, a defect to fix. Gordon Willis kept Brando’s eyes in the dark in The Godfather and held it against the studio. Before you rescue a shadow, ask what it does; if you can say it, you decided it.
The Place After
NOTE #208. Of a huge event, often only an ordinary place is left. In On This Site (1996) Joel Sternfeld photographed fifty banal American places where violence happened, each with a line of text. Photograph the aftermath, and let the line do the work.
The Photo Made Together
NOTE #206. Street photography teaches you to steal people; there’s another way. In Malick Sidibรฉ’s Bamako studio the youth chose how to be seen. Before you take someone, ask how they’d want to look, and make the photo together.
Write Your Own Rules
NOTE #205. The thing that improves you most isn’t a new camera, it’s a short list of your own faults. Tony Ray-Jones kept a notebook of orders to himself and it shaped Martin Parr. Write your three rules and keep them in your pocket.
Watch the Master Work
NOTE #204. You don’t learn from a master’s finished prints, you learn from watching them work. In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz watched Robert Frank shoot, quit his job that day, and picked up a camera. Watch the body, not the result.
The Work Before the Name
NOTE #203. The worth of a photo and the worth of the byline are two different things. Koudelka shot the 1968 Prague invasion anonymously as ‘P.P.’ and revealed it sixteen years later. Photograph what must be photographed even when no one will know it was you.
The Subject You Run From
NOTE #202. The strongest subject you have is the one you’d rather not photograph. Ishiuchi Miyako went back to Yokosuka, the occupied base town she was taught to fear, and made it her life’s work. Point the camera where it’s uncomfortable.