Tate Modern, Cruel and Tender 2003
Evans doesn’t just show us people and things at a particular instant. He persuades us to see how irretrievably that instant has passed, to be succeeded by others, uncountable and - more to the point - unaccountable. Rather than freeze time and deliver us a neatly wrapped package of certainties, Evans’s photographs deftly fling us into an abyss where everything is up for grabs. As Evans wrote in 1931, ‘The element of time entering into photography provides a departure for as much speculation as an observer cares to make.’ So his best pictures count as works of art not because they make matters clear. They count as art because, in spite of their accuracy, they do nothing of the kind. They call their subjects into question and leave us with the task of coming up with answers.
Image © Walker Evans
