Mar 29, 2009 10:54 am US/Eastern
CBS 2 At The Met: Walker Evans, Picture Postcards
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
Tiny pictures of everywhere-America. An afternoon on a Coney Island Beach. A barren street in Cheyenne, Wyoming, You can see thousands of postcards capturing snapshots of early 20th century life, all from the private collection of the late American Photographer Walker Evans. You'll learn that Evans' penchant for collecting started as a child. He had an eye for street-stuff, driftwood, bottlecaps, soda-can pull tabs and street signs. Met Curator Jeff Rosenheim tells CBS2's Dana Tyler that Evans was fascinated with how postcards recorded history without the varnish of fine art.
He said, "It showed our simple streets, the things we are most proud of. The new bank, the new main street, the lights on Main Street, the new stores, the business but also it showed them simply as a kind of way of recording what is not recorded in any other medium and he liked that."
Born in 1903, Evans grew up in the postcard era. He traveled all over, collecting postcards. Plus, family and friends would scribble their greetings to Walker and pop them in the mail. According to Rosenheim, Walker meticulously organized the postcards, and kept them in shoeboxes and suitcases.
"When you think about it he was so careful about it that there's not a lot of duplication their only a few where he has more than one so its really about, you know 8,900 different postcards. And this was something that he did for 50 years!"
Rosenheim likes to think of the exhibition as an adventure for the armchair traveler.
"Here's the guy with his, his boater hat, traveling down ah, main street ah, Broadway in Long Branch, New Jersey. Lakewood New Jersey, look at these great cars.
In fact what was tourist-ism becomes history very quickly with the postcard. These were tourist cards but tourist might mean someone who wants to tell their family this is the drug store where I am now working. Its a great thing."
Evans who died in 1975, had categories for the many landmarks and every day places of New York. His collection shows a bygone era of the city.
"We have the Flatiron Building and on this side the sort of standard skyscrapers. We've got the Empire State Building and a futuristic view of the modern city which we practically have become. But in the middle what we have is just Coney Island. Great pictures of Coney Island; and Coney Island was probably responsible for as many postcards as anything in New York City and then view of all the other places."
Best known for his gripping photos of the rural South during the Depression, Evans also worked for two decades at "Fortune" magazine.
Rosenheim says Evans even turned some of his own photos into postcards. Though he never mailed them. "This is in Morgan City, Louisiana, 90 miles from New Orleans, and this is a postcard from 1929 and this is the photograph that he made from almost the exactly same position.
Evans was not trying to duplicate exact postcards; he was trying to duplicate their spirit.
Rosenheim can't help but say, wish you here! "Walker Evans and the Picture Postcard," at the Met through Memorial Day.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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