Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories

Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a tragic epoch, the antithesis of the Gay Nineties. He met and became close friends with Walker Evans, a photographer who had collaborated with James Agee to create Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Lesy's friendship with Evans was intense and rewarding, as they shared a belief that photographs were not flat and static documents, but had meanings, beliefs, and emotions. Lesy has inspired us to open our eyes, minds, and hearts to the many layers of meaning and feeling in photos.

Format: Hardback
Length: 176 pages
Publication date: 15 December 2022
Publisher: Blast Books,U.S.

In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip, he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful Gay Nineties. It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation.

That year Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Old, frail, with just two years left to live, Evans was still urgently and obsessively photographing. Outside the rooms he inhabited, Lesy writes, the world was scattered with objects on their way to oblivion. He photographed them in their passage. Brief as their friendship was, it was intense and rewarding. Each admired the other; each saw himself reflected in the other: aesthetic visionaries who shared a radical belief that photographs were not flat and static documents—that the plain truth of the images was not as plain as it seemed, Lesy explains. Meanings, beliefs, and emotions lay crisscrossed under the surface of the most plainspoken photographs.

Throughout his career in the classroom and in more than a dozen books, Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.

In this unconventional, lyrical biography, Lesy traces Evanss intimate, idiosyncratic relationships with men and women—the circle of friends who made Walker Evans who he was. Wonder and scrutiny produced the portraits Walker made in his prime, Lesy writes. Evanss portraits were not just records of people; they were windows into their souls, Lesy explains. They were not just photographs; they were works of art.

Evanss photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and they have inspired countless artists and photographers. They have also been the subject of numerous books and essays, including this one.

In conclusion, Michael Lesy was a visionary scholar and photographer who combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful Gay Nineties. He met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writer James Agee to create another towering landmark in the American photo-essay, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evanss photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and they have inspired countless artists and photographers. They have also been the subject of numerous books and essays, including this one. Lesy has continually inspired us to open our eyes, our minds, and our hearts to those many layers of meaning and feeling in photos, from seemingly ordinary snapshots to majestic landscapes.

Weight: 652g
Dimension: 186 x 222 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780922233526