Walker Evans photographs are invaluable to me. He captured the Great Depression of my grandparents and great grandparents in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, his collaboration with James Agee. Of course I grew up with stories of how hard life was then: my mother’s father was a sharecropper’s son and ran away when he was thirteen. My father’s mother and aunt ran a makeshift hardware store in their garage to get by—their father worked in a coal mine. I can find the Florida I know too, that I grew up in—bait shops, boats, marinas, cypress swamps, the beach, the circus. Apparently Evans only found two things worth photographing in Tallahassee: a Greek Revival mansion and a group of women on a sidewalk, at least from what I can find, and according to an essay by Robert Plunkett that accompanies the photos in Walker Evans: Florida, put out by the Getty Museum. Next to the Greek Revival house, Plunkett notes: “Ralph Waldo Emerson, no less, described Tallahassee as “a grotesque place.” I do understand it’s not necessarily flattering to be the subject of art, the object of an artist’s gaze, to be looked at as a novelty, to be from a place people want to “try to understand.” All the same, I’m grateful any time I see myself in art.
-Morgan English