Description: A unique meeting of two transformative talents in American photography, Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men) and Michael Lesy (Wisconsin Death Trip), with a selection of Evans's little-seen Polaroid portraits and last works
Brief description: Michael Lesy is one of America's leading photographic scholars. His books include Wisconsin Death Trip, Snapshots 1971-1977, Murder City, Angel's World, Long Time Coming: A Photographic Portrait of America, 1935-1943, and Looking Backward: A Photographic Portrait of the World at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. In 2007, the United States Artists Foundation named Professor Lesy its first Simon Fellow, and in 2013 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography Studies. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is professor emeritus of literary journalism at Hampshire College.
Review Quotes: For most viewers, Walker Evans will always be a man of the 1930s, an era-defining genius who lost his way as life changed. Yet his late work--and particularly the images he made using a Polaroid SX-70 in 1973-74, just before his death in 1975--has had admirers, passionate but rare. . . . Flat, deeply shadowed, eerie, they resonate with a desperate immediacy that seems more in keeping with contemporary sensibilities than does the classical austerity of the more renowned work of four decades earlier.--Barry Schwabsky "Bookforum"