The well-known critic, poet, and impresario Lincoln Kirstein, in an essay included as part of [Walker] Evans’s American Photographs, the catalogue for the artist’s landmark show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, indicated how his friend’s gift as a photographer was that he could single out the specific, the particular, so as to suggest a shared, but often otherwise unrecognized commonality. “The power of Evans’s work,” Kirstein wrote, “lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets.” If Evans could lay bare the truth in one person, he could point it out in, and consequently for, everyone.
—Richard Deming, This Exquisite Loneliness: What Loners, Outcasts, and the Misunderstood Can Teach Us About Creativity (Viking – Penguin Random House, 2023)
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