Walker Evans
Many Are Called,
introduction by James Agee,
foreword by Luc Sante,
afterword by Jeff L. Rosenheim.
Yale University Press, 208 pages, $40
It has been said that the past is a foreign country, where things were done differently. This reissue of Walker Evans’s Many Are Called, first published in 1966 and consisting of ninety duotone prints of photographs taken in the New York City subways in the late 1930s and early 1940s, is indeed a vivid reminder of how quickly even the recent past acquires a look that is markedly distant from our present experience.
From a twenty-first-century perspective, the most striking aspects of the New York subway riders in Evans’s photographs are their middle-class dress and demeanor. The majority of male and female adults in these pictures are wearing proper hats and coats. With few exceptions, the men are clean-shaven and the women’s faces are made-up with care. (There isn’t a baseball cap to be seen in a single picture.) Nothing looks crazy or even unseemly. Ordinary people are granted their privacy and dignity.
When we descend into the New York subways today, what we are likely to encounter are slovenly dress and a kind of casual exhibitionism. There is an abundance of tattoos to be seen on the persons of the younger men and women, and an even greater abundance of metal piercings, not only on the ears but the lips, the nose, the chin, and even the tongue, not to mention the exposed navels that are now the fashion for many young women—and even some of the boys—who, whatever their weight, have managed to squeeze themselves into the low-slung, tight-fitting jeans and abbreviated t-shirts that are now a standard uniform. The days are gone when most adults still “dressed up” when they left home for either business or pleasure.
It is, of course, the fast pace of life in New York that compels its inhabitants to reinvent themselves in every generation. This is what makes Evans’s Many Are Called so different in feeling and implication from his more celebrated collaboration with James Agee in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, their epic account of Southern sharecroppers. Whereas the subway riders lived their lives, literally and otherwise, in an environment of rapid change, the sharecroppers lived theirs in a condition of social and moral stasis that remained immune to change. It was a large part of Evans’s genius that he was so closely attuned to the nuances of these radical differences.