Editorial.(ANTIQUES)(Editorial)

Walker Evans regarded every photographic image as essentially a reference, a ratification, a philosophy of authentication chat led him to begrudge the artiness chat he so disliked in the work of Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. Certainly, the "real" effect conveyed by his photographs predisposes the viewer toward a purely documentary interpretation or his work. As John Szarkwoski observed, his was "another kind of photography that was so plain and common, so free of personal handwriting, that it seemed almost the antithesis of art: the kind of photography that was seen in newspapers and newsreels, on picture postcards, and in the windows of real estate dealers." But Evans's greatness lay in accepting and acquiring the complete knowledge of the paradox of the photographic document: the image as an imprint of reality and as an article of aesthetic meditation.

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Evans grew up in Chicago and attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he discovered literature and entertained the idea of becoming a writer himself. In 1926, after dropping out of Williams College, he enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris and gravitated toward the ...