A Tribute to Walker Evans

I've been researching the work of Walker Evans who is considered one of the greatest social documentary photographers of the 20th century. Although he abandoned the candid moments in the tradition of Henri Cartier Bresson, Evans would return to a place with a large format camera and capture the essence of our culture through the presentation of artifacts within the landscape.

Lloyd Fonvielle writes about Evan's work that is published by Aperture and describes it as a vision of American poverty that is unlike European poverty which had been romanticized in the work of Atget, but rather a "poverty of culture" whereby our architecture may refer to european style but is cheaply built in an industrial age by a young country that has chosen to litter the landscape with advertising in pursuit of the wealth of the "American Dream."

I have always been drawn to this type of imagery due to my own blue collar roots and family mythology of working, traveling, and working some more. As I look around Spokane I am fascinated by place names that reflect wealth, power, and happiness and yet are far from it. In neighborhoods of every kind we see the all too common white picket fence that illustrates our pursuit of the American dream, although if you look closer you see emblems of alternative beliefs and politics.

These photographs were taken primarily around Sunset Blvd, Government Way, and Inland Empire Way which connects Highway 2 and the Latah neighborhoods. I have included a couple of previous photos from the South Hill and the lower East Side along the Internet just to sparkle some extremities to my portrait of Spokane.

Sunset Blvd is a street filled with old motels and apartments that have been usurped by larger hotels near the airport. These photographs are like a cross between the Brat Pack 60's and Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Today these are often used as flop houses for a transient population. I also photographed the Latah neighborhood which runs along Inland Empire Way. This neighborhood is a modern reflection of the 20th century challenges for the working class. And finally to complete my patchwork quilt of Americana, I revisited some rural areas within a few of miles of our downtown core.

The final image is the last remaining film store in Spokane and seemed appropriate for this photographic project.

Creating A Memory

I'm taking a class in visual storytelling. We recently watched the film "After Life" that was about this idea where when you die you go to a place where you get to spend a week deciding what memory you would like to take with you into the after life. The newly departed spend a week thinking about what their most important memory is that they would like to remember and it is recreated for them just like a movie being filmed on a set. I was asked to think of a memory from my life and to recreate it in a similar way.

One of my fondest memories involves my 10th birthday when I received a 22 rifle for a present. As a kid we spent almost every weekend camping, fishing, and hunting. When I received my very own rifle I felt so proud and grown up. When my great aunt and uncle passed away all of our outdoor activities stopped. The last time I handled a rifle was when I was 16. My father and I used to love to go hunting just to go for a hike in the crisp fall air. We never shot anything and I have never killed a deer, but the memories are so special to me.

I asked my parents to come down to my property to recreate this memory. I used my son to stand in for me. My father still had my old 22 rifle so we were able to put together images that feel so real and yet are totally staged. My dad used to wear a wool hunting hat and I used to borrow his filson wool coat. They're both gone now but I did have my dad wear my wool hat and my son wore one of my flannel shirts. You can just make out that the shirt is just a little big on him.

The black and white photographs create a sense of nostalgia and look as though they could have been taken back in 1979. After creating the images of the shooting my family and I sat around the dining table and I decided to photograph my son and parents with the beautiful window light filtering through the late afternoon. I think the image of my son standing proudly against the chair expresses the pride I felt on that special birthday. Afterwards, I printed out some of the images and thought of how I could encapsulate the whole experience by photographing my hand holding the nostalgic photograph.

Photography is not reality, but it is a way of representing our memories with tremendous detail in a way that let's us take only what we want to recall with us.