American Photographs is an exhibition currently showing at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It borrows its title from Walker Evans’ book of photographs, published in 1938.
“Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.” Walker Evans
In 1980 I was a student in Paris. It was a year of protests, strikes and demonstrations at universities, including the Sorbonne. After a couple of months I decided to use this as an excuse to stop attending lectures and study on my own. I read a lot. I spent hours walking around the city. I went to museums, exhibitions and plays.
I remember buying a postcard from a bookseller by the Seine – a sepia photograph of a cobblestone courtyard surrounded by flaking buildings and peeling wooden shutters. The photographer was Eugene Atget and everything about the picture coincided in my imagination with the 19th century French novels I was reading.
Later, I discovered the photographs of Henri Cartier Bresson, Walker Evans and Robert Frank. According to my diary, on February 16th 1981, I went to two exhibitions dedicated to Walker Evans. Both were in small galleries – one featured the most famous of his photographs, the Alabama sharecroppers during the Great Depression and the other, titled New York between the Wars, was a collection of street scenes and anonymous subway riders.
The work of Robert Frank and Walker Evans spoke to my fascination with America and I was drawn to their images of ordinary people captured in unguarded moments. The black and white photographs were unfiltered and emotionally raw, reflecting a complexity of life in the United States that I was anxious to discover for myself.
In the spring of 1984, with savings of $900, I left London on a one-way ticket to New York. I flew People Express, the airline that operated like a bus service. You paid the fare in cash from your seat. In Newark I was granted a six month visa and with that, I was ready for the Promised Land.
I travelled on Greyhound buses, staying in cheap motels and visiting Civil War battlefields and the homes of former presidents. People were friendly, although puzzled by the fact that I was travelling without a car.
Old family friends, both artists, had invited me to spend Memorial Day weekend in Maine. Getting to Cranberry Island involved two flights, a drive, a boat-ride and a flat-bed pick-up truck. Final access to the house, which stood on a point, required stumbling across a pebbly beach at midnight.
Cranberry Island is a beautiful, magical place. Just two miles long and one mile wide, the island is rich in birds, hills, woods and water. In the 1980s, there were just 40 year-round residents, most of them artists and fishermen. We visited Mark, a painter who had studied in Paris in the 1940s when Picasso and Leger were living there.
At a dinner of neighbours one evening I met Isabelle Storey, a vivacious and attractive woman. Born and raised in Switzerland, she and her husband, a photographer, left Zurich in 1958. Soon after they arrived in New York, Isabelle was introduced to Walker Evans. Within a matter of weeks she had left her husband and told Walker that she wanted to marry him, which she did in 1960. She was twenty-seven. He was thirty years her senior.
In 1970 she left him too and shortly afterwards married Jim Storey, a successful lawyer with an active and well-connected social life. The couple lived in Boston and summered on Cranberry Island.
Isabelle’s stories of her early relationship with Walker sounded challenging and I wondered what had motivated her to go through with the marriage. He was brilliant and compelling, she replied.
She told me about another unhappy love affair that had recently occurred on Cranberry Island between a local boy and a girl from a wealthy Boston family. When the young woman ended the relationship, the abandoned lover was so distraught that he bulldozed her family home into the sea.
Walker Evans died in 1975. Isabelle Storey Evans returned to her homeland in 2022, where she died two years later at the age of 91.
*“The eye should learn to listen before it looks.” Robert Frank
Eugene Atget born, Paris 1857 – 1927
Walker Evans born, St. Louis 1903 – 1975
Henri Cartier-Bresson born, Chanteloup-en-Brie 1908 – 2004
Robert Frank born, Zurich 1924 – 2019
American Photographs is at the Victoria and Albert Museum until May, 2027