| Abstract: | Abstract It is an article of faith among photographers and scholars that Walker Evans' American Photographs is a sequence of pictures rather than a simple collection or anthology; that is to say that the photographs should be looked at in the order in which they are given. Indeed the book is often spoken of as innovative and influential in precisely that respect (among others). Some years ago I set out to learn more about the origin of Evans' sequence in the context of a broader investigation of American Photographs.1 That study (which remained unpublished) has now been superseded in many ways by Alan Trachtenberg's insightful discussion in the book Reading American Photographs, which appeared in 1989.2 Nevertheless some of my original material remains useful and I offer it here largely intact, with only a small number of revisions and additions. |
