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Walker Evans’s photographs might better be called fictions than documents, or even documentary fictions. Their mode is self-abnegation, the cherished detachment and withholding of signs of the author’s person that Evans learned from Flaubert and James and Joyce and other masters of modern writing. Evans called his method “documentary style.” It is the look of objectivity, of directness, simplicity, and vernacular authenticity, that gives his pictures their persuasive authority. But that look, of course, is another kind of pose that disguises more complex purposes beyond merely to record the surface appearance of things. Intentions beyond literal documentary show up in the way Evans published and arranged his 1930s pictures, their order on the page, and the relations among them: structures of organization neither narrative nor thematic but something closer to a dialogic form of interaction, images in conversation with each other.
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