Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by Walker Evans

Author:Walker Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I think there is at the middle of this sense of the importance and dignity of actuality and the attempt to reproduce and analyze the actual, and at the middle of this antagonism toward art something of real importance which is by no means my discovery, far less my private discovery, but which is a sense of ‘reality’ and of ‘values’ held by more and more people, and the beginnings of somewhat new forms of, call it art if you must, of which the still and moving cameras are the strongest instruments and symbols. It would be an art and a way of seeing existence based, let us say, on an intersection of astronomical physics, geology, biology, and (including psychology) anthropology, known and spoken of not in scientific but in human terms. Nothing that springs from this intersection can conceivably be insignificant: everything is most significant in proportion as it approaches in our perception, simultaneously, its own singular terms and its ramified kinship and probable hidden identification with everything else.

Along the lines of this possible ‘art’ and attitude toward existence, nothing that follows* can pretend to be anything more advanced than a series of careful but tentative, rudely experimental, and fragmentary renderings of some of the salient aspects of a real experience seen and remembered in its own terms.

But if that is of any interest to you whatever, it is important that you should so far as possible forget that this is a book That you should know, in other words, that it has no part in that realm where disbelief is habitually suspended. It is much simpler than that It is simply an effort to use words in such a way that they will tell as much as I want to and can make them tell of a thing which happened and which, of course, you have no other way of knowing. It is in some degree worth your knowing what you can of not because you have any interest in me but simply as the small part it is of human experience in general.

It is one way of telling the truth: the only possible way of telling the kind of truth I am here most interested to tell.

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