"The Transparent Eyeball": On Emerson and Walker Evans

Author(s): CAROLINE BLINDER

Source: Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal , December 2004, Vol. 37, No. 4, a
special issue: THE PHOTOGRAPH (December 2004), pp. 149-163
Published by: University of Manitoba

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030031

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 Taking Emerson's "Nature" as its starting point, this paper argues that in Lincoln Kirstein's and William Carlos

Williams's readings of Evans as a visionary artist of the vernacular, Emersonian ideals were always part and

parcel of the search for an intrinsically American manifesto of photography.

"The Transparent Eyeball":

Qn Emerson and
Walker Evans

CAROLINE BLINDER

Standing on the bare ground, - my head bathed by the

blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, - all mean

egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball;

I am nothing ; I see all; the currents of the Universal

Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of

God. - Emerson, "Nature"

starting point two distinct

This pieces starting
pieces of investigation of point critical two writing takes distinct as that its
critical writing that
emanated in response to Walker Evanss rise to fame in the 1930s: Lincoln Kirstein's
"Photographs of America: Walker Evans" and William Carlos Williams's "Sermon with
a Camera." Responding in particular to the publication of American Photographs , the
catalogue for the 1938 Evans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, these writings
not only reflected but partially embraced Emersonian idealism as a way to codify the
aesthetic qualities of Evans's camera. In the process, this essay argues, they constructed
a vision of American documentary photography as a native and transcendental art.
In writing on American Photographs, Kirstein and Williams used an Emersonian
rhetoric to connect the everyday, the vernacular, with a spiritualized and transcendent
idea of vision, a vision in which the transcendental operated as a useful metaphor for

Mosaic 37/4 0027- 1276-04/1 490 16$02.00©Mosaic

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 150 Mosaic 37/4 (December 2004)

the link between the aesthetic potential of the camera and its mechanical use. For
Kirstein and Williams, American Photographs proved, once and for all, that photogra-
phy, even within the remit of documentary photography, did not constitute merely a
dispassionate representation of "real" lives and people. Instead it promised an active,
living way to articulate the importance of the vernacular as intrinsic to the modernist
project. The representation of the vernacular, under siege one could argue in the 1930s,
thus lent itself to a discourse interested in the use- value of photography as a marker for
America in both Utopian and distopian terms. If Kirstein and Williams were looking
for something that could prove the currency of an American vernacular under duress
for economic and political reasons, photography seemed to be that thing. In creating
images of vernacular life, Evans's camera - according to Kirstein and Williams - could
be established as a visionary mechanism in its own right, a useful metaphor for the
artist's relationship to his or her subject, to nature and landscape, and to an investiga-
tion into representation itself.
This essay takes as its specific starting point Kirstein's assertion that Evans's images
represent "much that is best in photography's past and in its American present" (192).
The fact that Kirstein and Williams sought to spiritualize the photographic enterprise
whilst being attuned to the tensions implicit in the era's political and cultural use of
documentary photography, is a matter I have to take into account. Hence the essay
shows how Evans, although representative of a particular modernist effort, was also
seen as a visionary in a transcendentalist sense, as an artist whose Emersonian aesthetics
sought to combine personal vision with national specificity. The issue for both Kirstein
and Williams was not only to provide an entry into a definition of the vernacular capa-
ble of incorporating the houses, the objects, and faces of the people photographed on
a wider metaphorical level, but also the mass of social and philosophical contradictions
that make up the documentary project.

As ment,ment,
one of
Evans's
Evans's
success
the first
was aided
successin documentary
this respect bywasKirstein's
aided photographers
and Williams'sin canny
this respect to by be Kirstein's canonized and by Williams's the art establish- canny
use of an Emersonian rhetoric to connect the vernacular with a transcendent idea of

vision. One way for Kirstein and Williams to define Evans as a visionary artist was by
aligning the process of photography with Emerson's original desire to absorb and be
absorbed into nature, to become a transparent rather than simply reflective eye. In fol-
lowing Emerson's dictum that "The act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the
spectacle [ . . . ] are one" ( 1 1 ), the transcendental ethos is aligned with the camera's abil-
ity to capture the real and the spiritual, the native and the universal simultaneously.
Hence, Evans's images of vernacular America, of regional architecture, objects, signs,

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 Caroline Blinder 151

and people become representative of a "moment of seeing" in which a secular vision

of America is given sacred implications.
The idea of reinserting a sacred purpose into the photographic project became part
of the era's attempts to codify photography as a medium with far-reaching metaphoric,
aesthetic, and cultural ramifications. In this context, the combination of a self-effacing
aspect with a moment of total vision - "I am nothing; I see all" - in itself suggests a
constant oscillation between positions behind and in front of a metaphorical camera;
positions which, incidentally, also mimic and reflect the role of the critic vis-à-vis the
subject of photography.
On first sight, it may appear contradictory to connect a spiritualized rendition of
the vernacular with a photographer such as Evans, famous for his rendition of the
more subtle nuances of man-made objects, for his photographs of towns and places
static and in repose. Nevertheless, what Kirstein and Williams realized was that in order
for photography to be both illuminative and symbolic, the quality of the vernacular
actually shown was not really the issue. Rather than a question of authenticity and
veracity, the importance of the vernacular lay in what happened to it when framed by
the photographers eye, a point clarified by Evans himself:

A distinct point, though, is made in the lifting of these objects from their original settings.
The point is that this lifting, is, in the raw, exactly what the photographer is doing with his
machine, the camera, anyway, always. The photographer, the artist, "takes" a picture: sym-
bolically he lifts an object or a combination of objects, and in so doing he makes a claim
for that object or that composition, and a claim for his act of seeing in the first place. The
claim is that he has rendered his object in some way transcendent, and that in each instance
his vision has penetrating validity, (qtd. in Thompson 229)

Evans's description of the "lifting of objects" is more than a way to provide timeless
or classical depictions of American society; it is about transposing a particular and
emphatically personal point of view. Transcendence for Evans is not about tran-
scending a historical context and/or social parameters; it is about "making a claim for
the act of seeing" itself. Kirstein's realization of this claim forms a significant part of
his commentary on American Photographs , in which he stresses the "penetrating vali-
dity" of Evans's photographs. According to Kirstein:

Physically the pictures in this book exist as separate prints. They lack the surface, obvious
continuity of the moving picture, which by its physical nature compels the observer to per-
ceive a series of images as parts of a whole. But these photographs, of necessity seen singly,
are not conceived as isolated pictures made by the camera turned indiscriminately here or

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152 Mosaic 37/4 (December 2004)

there. In intention and in effect they exist as a collection of statements deriving from and
presenting a consistent attitude. Looked at in sequence they are overwhelming in their
exhaustiveness of detail, their poetry of contrast, and, for those who wish to see it, their
moral implication. (193)

Kirsteins "moral implication" connects the belief in photography as a potentially eth-

ical art form with the rectitude of the photographer's eye and, by extension, his or her
choice of subject. "The exhaustiveness of detail" must coexist with the photographer's
"consistent attitude"; hence the thing itself (the object photographed) and the way the
photographer looks at it cannot be separated. According to Kirstein: "no matter how
sensitive an artist's eye may be, it is irrelevant unless fixed on its special subjects. [. . .]
The wavelength of his [Evans's] vision is exactly equalled by the radiation of the
images which attract and repel it" (194).
The desired alignment between the subject and its moment of capture reiterates a
crucial issue for Evans, Kirstein, and Williams: namely the question of how to deal with
human experience when it threatens to overwhelm our normal conceptual framework.
In this respect, "isolated pictures" are not enough; the image has to be grounded in the
photographer's viewpoint; it has to derive from and represent a particular subject,
which in turn refers back to the photographer's unique "wavelength of vision." This
concept of a unique and "consistent attitude" is a fundamental starting point for an
investigation into the photographer's visionary capabilities, and it exists partly because
Emerson had given Williams and Kirstein the necessary language to define an
American sense of self-hood in which the idea of vision was a practical as well as spir-
itual given. Not only does Emerson's "Nature" lend itself to a philosophy in which the
American landscape and the portrayal of its people is symptomatic of an ideal of
democracy, "a universe that is the property of every individual in it," but it defines this
process in distinctly ocular terms (Emerson 20).
The focus on the ocular, together with a belief in commonality and collective
desire, becomes fundamental to a photographic tradition that believes in art's ability to
synthesize the political with the visionary. In Emerson in particular, the ocular and
visionary ability of the poet/writer/artist is based on his immersion into the surround-
ing landscape: "Wise men [...] fasten words again to visible things. The moment our
discourse rises above the ground of familiar facts and is inflamed by passion or exalted
by thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest [ . . . ] will find that a
material image more or less luminous arises in his mind" (22).
For Kirstein, location, and particularly the unification of location and inhabitant,
are fundamental to Evans and they find their proof in Evans's ability to record "alike the

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 Caroline Blinder 153

vulgarization [. . .] and the naive creative spirit, imperishable and inherent in the ordi-
nary man." Able to "elevate fortuitous accidents of juxtaposition into ordained design,"
Evans is presented as a mediator of the secular as it becomes divine, or, one could say,
of the secular as it is made divine through Evans's camera. Evans's fragments gain their
use-value through their ability to gesture symbolically. As Kirstein writes: "His eye is on
the symbolic fragments of nineteenth-century American taste, crumpled pressed-tin
Corinthian capitals, debased baroque ornament, wooden ratification and cracked
cast-iron moulding, survivals of our early imperialistic expansion" ( 194). As such, tran-
scendentalism in ocular terms is not only about the unification of the individual with
the spiritual but also about finding order amongst the fragments of material life, a rec-
onciliation between the private and the public, the political, from "imperialistic expan-
sion" to the aesthetics of nineteenth-century "American taste."
The mixture of old and new, hand-made objects and industrial manufacture, is
not dissimilar to the mix-and-match attitude employed in ideological terms by all
those American writers, including Emerson, trying to define a "native spirit." There
are problems in this, just as there is a real risk that transcendentalism, transposed
from its philosophical roots, will become just another catch phrase for certain ideas
and juxtapositions that occur as naturally within photography as within any other art
form. Translating transcendentalism in a twentieth-century context into something
synonymous with a desire for spirituality, and by extension into distaste for the com-
mercialisation of art (a distaste witnessed, incidentally, in Kirstein's comments on the
1930s as an "epoch crass and corrupt" [194]), has its own problems. Assuming, for
instance, that transcendentalism originated in a desire for spiritual and intellectual
reintegration, one cannot further suppose that the idea of integration is somehow
intrinsic to American art in the 1930s, even if it does bring forward the issue of
coherency and democracy, the very tropes that were under siege during the
Depression. Regardless, it is no surprise that documentary photography was actively
asserting - even while questioning - the ideals of a democratic heritage. For Kirstein,
Evans's images record "an age before an imminent collapse," and for this reason, they
inadvertently applaud democratic ideals that are now corrupted: "His work, print
after print of it, seems to call to be shown before the decay which it portrays flattens
all sagging roof-trees and rusts all the twisted automobile chassis. Here are the records
of the age before an imminent collapse [ . . . ] to salvage whatever was splendid for the
future reference of the survivors (196).
Within the idea of a democratic heritage, Kirstein outlines the importance of the
visionary as a way to incorporate the transcendental and the vernacular into "the record
of an age." In this respect, documentary photography, although based on a representation

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 154 Mosaic 37/4 (December 2004)

of the living, the discernible, partakes of the visionary aspects of the transcendental
by promulgating the importance of regionalism as an internal as well as external land-
scape. Thus Emerson's nineteenth-century faith in the illuminative aspects of nature
in a twentieth- century context can become Kirstein's "twisted automobile chassis"
which, despite its non- salvageable aspect, nevertheless forms an essential component
of the landscape of the twentieth century (Kirstein 196). It is because the photogra-
pher is visionary that these seemingly inconsequential objects can become both
prophetic and splendid.
Crossing the border between a nineteenth- and twentieth-century version of tran-
scendentalism in order to define a main current within the arts was in many ways an
unspoken tendency in the 1930s. The fact that it has lost its currency has as much to do
with a desire to bring photography into the twenty-first century, as it has to do with a
reluctance to see early-twentieth-century photography in anything other than mod-
ernist terms. The question, more specifically, is why writers would seek to contemporize
photography through a possibly antiquated notion of transcendentalism. Kirstein and
Williams share not only a definition of photography based on its ability to transcend
people and places in distinctly spiritualized terms, but also certain literary contempo-
raries and antecedents for whom the vernacular was linked to the transcendental aspi-
rations of the "true" American artist. Some of these antecedents are worth considering
briefly.

In inal
inalVernon
piece ofpiece Lewiscriticism
literary of literary
of theParrington's criticism Mainis defined
time, transcendentalism of the Currents time, transcendentalism in American Thought is defined 1927-1930 as an , idealis- a sem-
as an idealis-
tic point of view. By seeing it as a point of view rather than an embodied ideal, a
perspective rather than an aim, Parrington avoids having to locate transcendentalism in
a specific historical moment. In the process, transcendentalism becomes less reliant on
having to prove its philosophical status, thus providing the framework for a reading of
transcendentalist thought as a form of cultural movement. The appeal of such a move-
ment to artists - and not just during the Depression - for whom photography was seen
as no less than a way to re-educate the American public, is therefore no coincidence.
Another seminal literary critic who grasped the ramifications of transcendental-
ist thought across decades and literary genres was F.O. Matthiessen. In his American
Renaissance , Matthiessen took a vision of American culture largely based on transcen-
dentalist thought and attached it to a tradition of literary excellence. For Matthiessen,
the philosophical and ethical ramifications of the transcendentalist belief in the intrin-
sic goodness of nature and the importance of self-reliance could be translated, without
any necessary diffusion, into a literary vision, a vision in which art became not only

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 Caroline Blinder 155

compatible but essential to social justice. Matthiessen's main vision is crucial because
it allows a reading of Emerson's aesthetics in terms of art and artists not directly linked
to the transcendentalist movement in a nineteenth-century context.
Parrington and Matthiessen are two examples of writers for whom the idea of tran-
scendentalism translated into a wider search for an undiluted American voice. What

Kirstein and Williams did was pair this with their search for a discourse on photography
capable of incorporating the language of justice and democracy. This partly explains
why Emersonian ideals regained ethical, if not popular, currency both during the
Depression and after; it does not, however, in itself validate a primarily Emersonian
reading of all documentary photography. Most of the photographers working within
the auspices of the Farm Security Administration under Roy Striker, for example (and
it is worth remembering that Walker Evans was one such photographer), would have
gone to some lengths to remove themselves from a possibly antiquated and ineffective
(in their eyes) nineteenth-century vision of democracy. Nevertheless, as I have argued,
the Emersonian ethos cannot be ignored. On the one hand, it lies within the vernacu-
lar language accompanying the images, a language which both mimics Emerson's belief
in the importance of the language of "the common man" and Whitman's dream of an
American poetry based on inclusiveness and democracy. On the other hand, it also lies
in an aesthetic of a more formal and strategic nature in which the visionary is
described in ocular terms. According to Emerson in "Nature": "The light is always
identical in its composition, but it falls on a great variety of objects, and by so falling is
first revealed to us, not in its own form, for it is formless, but in theirs; in like manner,

thought only appears in the objects it classifies" (18).

Emerson's description of the "transparent eyeball" functions as a metaphor for the
artist's ability to discern the essential nature of objects and as a way to stress that the
transcendental is not formless. The "transparent eyeball" reflects nature's particulars,
much in the way that a camera lens exposes; and in the process illuminates, as Kirstein
put it, the "unrelieved, bare-faced, revelatory" facts (196). Thus while an element of
revelation exists in the procedure, the intent of the artist still has to appear as an order-
ing principle "in the objects it classifies" (Emerson 18). What is crucial is the fact that
reality is always actively constituted. Just as nature has to be experienced visually for its
true meaning to shine forth, the photographic eye has to be present to capture the
image. Contrary to what one might think, the "transparent eyeball" is not a free-float-
ing entity, but a necessary link between the observer and the landscape surrounding
him or her. Emerson is often misread in this regard, as many assume that within this
actively constituted reality the universal always prevails over the particular and the
individual, the timeless over the temporal. Rather, Emerson's belief in the importance

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156 Mosaic 37/4 (December 2004)

of the particular is not about absolute unity in a philosophical sense but about the
mechanisms we have at our disposal to describe things in an honest and truthful
manner. This is not to say that Emerson did not believe in a fundamental god-driven
unity underlying the worldly flux, but rather that art's role was to provide an insight
into that unity. The only way to do this was through the accurate description of the
particulars with which it was constituted, and I would argue that this is as apt a defi-
nition of the documentary ethos as one is likely to find.
Going back to Matthiessen, then, a link can be formed between Emerson's use of
the "transparent eyeball" as a precursor to the classification of objects and Evans's choice
of distinctly vernacular objects in American Photographs. In Matthiessen's use of tran-
scendentalism, the insistence on the common life as the foundation for art embodies an

American ideal, an ideal in which art should equally express and be representative of the
American people. This desire for an art that corresponds in an affirmative and true way
to actual lives is, in many ways, the defining factor of Evans's aesthetic. This is not to say
that documentary photography cannot evaluate the life it portrays nor that it cannot be
politicized in a complex manner. What it does accentuate is the importance placed on
photography's ability to embrace "the common life" and the vernacular symptomatic of
that life by writers like Kirstein and Williams.
While Kirstein and Williams were engaged in creating their own canon of Ameri-
can photography, Matthiessen's insight into the importance of transcendentalism for an
understanding of America's literary psyche was also facilitated by a process of authorial
canonization. While Matthiessen's chief aim was to situate such writers as Hawthorne,
Melville, and Whitman within American academia, Matthiessen's "interrelation" be-
tween "the stimulus that lay in the transcendental conviction that the word must become
one with the thing" also functions in the context of twentieth-century photography.
Matthiessen himself intuitively grasped at the possibility by linking "the effect of the
nineteenth century's stress on seeing, of its identification of the poet with the prophet or
seer" with "the connection, real if somewhat intangible, between the emphasis on vision
and that put on light by the advancing art of photography" (xiv). When Matthiessen
spoke of "the inevitability of the symbol as a means of expression for an age that was
determined to make a fusion between appearance and what lay behind it" (14), he was
speaking not merely of the nineteenth century but in the context of his own time,
namely the 1930s and 40s.
Less than a year after the publication of American Renaissance , another seminal
piece of literary criticism, Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds , traced the lineage from
a revival of naturalism in the nineteenth century to the documentary efforts of the
1930s. For Kazin, "the two great associations of the literature of social description -

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 Caroline Blinder 157

the New Deal and the camera" provided a literature in which "words and pictures
were not only mutually indispensable, a kind of commentary upon each other, but
curiously interchangeable." Pragmatically, Kazin would state: "nothing in this new lit-
erature, indeed, stands out as clearly as its attempts to use and even imitate the cam-
era" (500). Kazin - like Matthiessen - wanted to extend the progressive reform ideas
of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which a desired union between
labour and culture was to mimic the union between life and art. While Matthiessen's

book, published after the Depression, was born out of a belief in the survival skills of
the American people (made manifest paradoxically by the great literary efforts of the
nineteenth century), Kazin, from a more recognizably leftist perspective, recognized
photography as an effective means to "quicken the sensibility of fellowship" in an era
that needed to be reminded of its collective status (501). More importantly, Kazin, like
Matthiessen, saw writing and visual perception in the twentieth century as linked to
the nineteenth century and, in particular, to Emersonian idealism. In Kazin's assess-
ment of the documentary project, Emerson is strategically invoked in ways similar to
Kirstein and Williams, linking democracy and multiplicity, discontinuity and "truth":
"the camera [...] in itself so significant a medium of tension, fastened upon the
atmosphere of tension. And if the accumulation of visual scenes seemed only a col-
lection of 'mutually repellent particles' as Emerson said of his sentences, was not that
discontinuity, that havoc of pictorial sensations, just the truth of what the documen-
tary mind saw before it in the thirties?" (500).
The idea of documentary photography as a "havoc of pictorial sensations" pleased
Kazin's anarchic sensibility, but more importantly, it accentuated what Kirstein and
Williams had sought to establish, namely documentary's role in supplying a measure
of faith in the survival of American democracy. Evans may not have been particularly
concerned with an optimistic vision of America, but he knew, like Kazin, that the
increasing disenchantment with the dream of a national destiny was deep-rooted in
the need to affirm what it actually means to be American. This paradox, between
showing political, social, and economic reality and simultaneously reaffirming a belief
in a democratic America, is often revealed in the distance between what people write
on Evans and his actual aesthetics. In American Photographs , one could argue, Evans's
images enable a more complex vision of unification and democracy than the accom-
panying introduction by Kirstein, and yet this does not mean that Kirstein is unaware
of the political context of the images.
By comparison, Williams's political stance is more ambiguous. In regard to
American Photographs, Williams goes only so far as to say "the total effect is of a social
upheaval, not a photographic picnic" (qtd. in Rabb 310). The question remains of

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158 Mosaic 37/4 (December 2004)

course, what social upheaval is Williams actually thinking about? Is it the upheaval of
economic destitution or the upheaval of how we think about photography as a native
art? "In Evans's pictures also we are seeing fields of battle after the withdrawal of the
forces engaged. The jumbled wreckage, human and material, is not always so grim in
the present case but for all the detachment of the approach the effect is often no less
poignant" (Williams, Literature 310). Comparing Evans to the civil war photographer
Brady, Williams makes a point about the dustbowl farmers occupying a war zone in the
midst of the Depression, but his use of the word poignant is still more melancholic
than anger-inducing. There is no call for real political action, no sense that these
images have an actual force that supersedes their artistic intent. On the contrary, when
Williams starts to summarize what we may actually learn about the human condition
from Evans, he configures it not as a politicized manifesto, but in tones directly remi-
niscent of the opening paragraph of Emerson's "Nature." In answer to Emerson's famous
rhetorical questions, "Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Why should not we have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by rev-
elation to us, and not the history of theirs?" (Emerson 7), Williams responds: "and we
shall see our own country and its implications the better for Evans's work and come to
realize that the realm of art is here quite as well as elsewhere. [ . . . ] The artist must save
us. He's the only one who can. First we have to see. Or first we have to be taught to see"
(Williams 310).
Williams's use of Emerson is a case in point. Not only does he insert an Emersonian
gesture by calling for a uniquely American art form, he does so by invoking - like
Kirstein - the necessity for an art that may liberate the artist from the dictates of his-
torical and geographical placement and simultaneously stress the importance of
regionalism and tradition. To a certain extent, one could call this a mild form of
nationalistic schizophrenia; a schizophrenia which is as centred in the Depression as
it was in the warm up to the Civil War: the feeling that one's source of national pride
is slipping away and being corrupted at the same time. Tellingly, it mimics the tran-
scendentalist desire in the mid-nineteenth century to articulate an indigenous ver-
nacular untainted and pure. In writing on the romantic enterprise within American
letters, the critic Brown puts it this way: "Romanticism enabled Emerson and others
to raise cosmopolitan yet native standards for American expression because romanti-
cism's true scope was global, its ultimate interest concerned the whole of things rather
than one part or another. [ . . . ] The unrealizable, mobile sense of power that made
romanticism, for Americans, an import not so much appropriated or conformed to
but discovered within the capacities of the self and empirically affirmed in the con-
frontations with native place" (7).

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 Caroline Blinder 159

In this context, one could say that Williams, Emerson, and Kirstein share an
ambiguous relationship to the concept of American democracy, even as they are
engaged in the rehabilitation of a romantic discourse. The "confrontation with native
place" colours the romantic thrust within the documentary project even as it affords
the photographer "a mobile sense of power"; allowing him or her to empirically affirm
those "native standards" necessary for a vernacular art form. However, grounding the
photographer's ocular abilities in his capacity to illuminate the symbolic quality of
things, people, and places also means a necessarily complex manoeuvring of what the
artisťs purpose is in the first place. The chief problem of the notion that Emersonian
transparency is akin to the mechanistic procedure of the camera eye is that it implies
that the object shining like a light through the lens must necessarily inhabit a realm
distinct from present reality, that the meaning of things is reflected but not necessarily
present in the photograph. Like Coleridge's definition of the symbol, Emerson's notion
of transparency is based on a presence, which always refers back to something larger.
In Coleridge's terms, "a symbol [ . . . ] is characterised as by the translucence of the eter-
nal through and in the temporal. It always partakes of the reality which it renders intel-
ligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity, of
which it is the representative" (30). In the end, the representative aspect of the tran-
scendental cannot help but slot itself into a romantic tradition in which the local
becomes universalized and is made classical because it speaks to us of things inherently
human and real. When Williams writes that Evans must teach us to actually see, he -
like Coleridge - makes the eternal manifest in the temporal: "Evans saw what he saw
here, in this place - this was his universal. In this place he saw what is universal. By his
photographs he proves it" (Williams, 310).

sense,American
In sense, is largelyis equal
largelyto Photographs,
the actual experience of seeing
equal to the the images
the content actual side by side.of the moment of seeing of translucence, the images its side proof by side. in a
experience
Hence Evans, according to Williams, like Emerson and Coleridge before him, sets a
standard for art by which the transcendental becomes an actual prospect. By necessity,
it can never become more than this. All it can hope for is to render how the photo-
graphic project makes the "eternal" manifest through the temporal, as captured through
the camera lens. As such, the "transparent eyeball" is less a concept than a metaphor for
the camera eye, and less a metaphor than a certain prescription for activity. The event
of transparency becomes a way to picture the way meanings come forth from behind
their representations. It is, in other words, about critical vision and how such a vision is
defined. For Emerson, transparency manifests itself only as an attribute of the medium
lying between two discontinuous realms: the essence of the transparent eyeball is to be

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160 Mosaic 37/4 (December 2004)

between two things. In the grammar of seeing, the eye sees through one thing to the
next thing; the lens is transparent only in that it plays its part in the larger enterprise
of vision, which again is proven through Emerson's insistence on figures of actual
physical sight, confirming once more that the transparent eyeball passage is, above all,
a paradigm of visual perception.
In the "transparent eyeball" passage, Emerson says that "mean egotism has van-
ished" (11) but the eyeball becomes transparent only when some higher force looks
down upon the transparent eye configured in the text. Hence, the meaning that
appears in the figure of the eyeball is always linked to the artist's own identity. The "I"
of the text is also the eye that sees itself seeing and that oversees its own projection
into the frame of the photograph, even if it is not physically visible. Paradoxically, the
act of seeing is always in some way a simultaneous act of affirmation.
Transparency, therefore, far from signifying a passive state, manufactures its own
creation. It affirms the presence of the photographer in the act of photographing. It
is a mode of awareness of the necessary distance, as well as proximity, between the
photographer and the objects photographed. The metaphor of transparency illus-
trates the transcendentalist enterprise insofar as transcendentalism is preoccupied
with ways to negotiate the interval between natural signs and their supernatural
meanings, or one could say, the representation of an American vernacular that is
symbolic and real at the same time. For Kirstein and Williams, it is also a suitable way
to question how the photographs, illuminated in a moment of transparency, stand in
relation to the self, the photographer, and the things photographed.
Within this context, the ideal of encyclopaedic representation, and the ability to
illustrate the symbolic nature of the vernacular, together with the transparent eyeball,
both lift and ground the American project. This particular vision of Evans, in which
an ecstatic definition of photography partakes of the romantic project, is ever-present
within the American arts. This project is frequently compromised by political, social,
and economic conditions, but it is still potent enough to present the photographer as
part prophet, part visionary. It is no coincidence, then, that Kirstein can claim that
Evans's vision is contemporary, even as he "recognizes in his photographs a way of
seeing which has appeared persistently throughout the American past" (Kirstein 198).
With this in mind, placing the metaphor of the transcendental eyeball at the fore-
front of Evans's work is more than merely an attempt to define some form of
American romanticism independent of Europe's. It illuminates how photography, like
writing in the 1930s, was founded on a desire to define a modernist aesthetic in which
the search for transcendence could comfortably coexist with the camera's mimetic
capabilities. Evans, in a 1971 interview with Leslie George Katz, steadfastly insisted on

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 Caroline Blinder 161

linking the idea of transcendence with his own craft: "Iťs logical to say that what I do
is an act of faith. Other people may call it conceited, but I have faith and conviction.
[. . .] I think that what I am doing is valid and worth doing, and I use the word tran-
scendent. That's very pretentious, but if I'm satisfied that something transcendent
shows in a photograph Tve done, that's it. It's there, I've done it" ( Incognito 19; emph.
Evans's). Even in the extreme rendering of the ecstatic experience that it is the trans-
parent eyeball, instrumental procedures are described for the purpose of duplication
and application. Thus even Emerson's spontaneous vision remains decisively empiri-
cal, as does Evans's; there is discipline needed for the drawing out of more perfect
sight. As Emerson puts it, "what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too con-
cave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?" (205).

The sophical
sophicallineterms
between terms nevertheless
nevertheless the nineteenth
remains a diffused remains
one. In this and Evans's
respect, twentieth a diffused centuries one. In this in photographic respect, Evans's and almost philo-
almost
instantaneous canonization, a process facilitated by his ability to present himself as a
sage and accomplished photographer from the onset, has, oddly enough, stood him
in bad stead when it comes to examining his philosophical and literary lineage. One
reason lies in the seductiveness of Evans's self-assured stance as a self-made photog-
rapher. When asked whether he knew many photographers during the 1930s, Evans
responded: "No, I wasn't drawn to the world of photography. In fact I was against it.
I was a maverick. As a matter of fact, I really think I was on the right track right away,
and I don't think I've made many false moves. I now feel almost mystical about it. I
think something was guiding me, was working through me. I feel that I was doing
better than I knew how, that it was almost fate. I really was inventing something, but
I didn't know it" (qtd. in Cummings 86).
Evans's tendency to mythologize his own practice is seductive, partly because it
supports a reading of him as above external influences, partly because it positions him
both inside and outside the establishment. When asked about the importance of the
1938 exhibition at the MOMA, Evans readily confirmed its importance: "It was like a
calling card. It made it. The catalogue particularly, was a passport for me. It estab-
lished my style and everything. [...] As time went by it became more and more
important. It turned out to be a landmark. [ . . . ] It established the documentary style
as art in photography. The Modern is a very influential place" (qtd in Cummings 96).
Despite Evans's claim for "establishing the documentary style as art in photogra-
phy," the writing on Evans, as we have seen, forms part of a much longer philosophi-
cal lineage. Nevertheless, many critics still persist in reading American Photographs
through its ability to portray a popular expectation of what is classically American,

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162 Mosaic 37/4 (December 2004)

and the emotive context of why so many expect and desire a comfortably canonical
vision of America is not to be underestimated. Thus for many, Evans's images still
speak to an idea of America as somehow beyond the forces of corporate capitalism,
an idea that is partly sentimental, partly pastoral in its logic. Evans's choice of loca-
tions, his eye for the use- value of the inanimate and its aesthetic and emotive quali-
ties nevertheless all indicate that he instinctively chooses objects, from coca-cola signs
to worn out wooden utensils, with a very clear and crafty sense that they could be read
in emotive terms. The fact that his seemingly distanced perspective, aided by a two
dimensional sense of flatness and careful arrangement of characters on a proportion-
al line, is different from the angled and heroically inflicted imagery of photographers
such as Dorothea Lange does not mean that Evans aimed for uncompromising repre-
sentations of Depression era culture. In creating a discourse of the vernacular as more
than the sum total of actual lived existence, Evans took the idea of vision as inherent
in the encyclopaedic and vernacular nature of photography and allowed it to align
itself with Emerson's idea of transparency. When Evans made "a claim for the act of
seeing as rendering the object transcendent," he also paradoxically confirmed Kirstein
and William's supposition that, of all the arts, photography, despite its compromised
position, would remain the most ethical (qtd in Thompson 229).

WORKS CITED

Brown, Lee Rust. The Emerson Museum & Practical Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Whole. Cambridge
MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "The Statesman's Manual." Lay Sermons. Ed. R.J. White. The Collected Works of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Vol. 6. Gen. Ed. Kathleen Coburn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1969. 3-52.

Cummings, Paul. "Walker Evans." Artists in their Own Words: Interviews. London: St. Martin's Press, 1979
23-31.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. "Nature." The Portable Emerson. Ed. Carl Bode. New York: Penguin Books, 1946.
7-51.

Evans, Walker. American Photographs. New York: MOMA, 1938.

Kazin, Alfred. On Native Grounds. New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1942.

Kirstein, Lincoln. "Photographs of America: Walker Evans." American Phot

1938. 189-198.

Lange, Dorothea. American Photographs. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994.

Matthiessen, F.O .American Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1941.

Parrington, Vernon Louis. Main Currents in American Thought 1927-1930. New York: Harcourt Brace and
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 Caroline Blinder 163

Rabb, Jane M., ed. Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P,
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Thompson, J.L., ed. Walker Evans at Work. London: Thames and Hudson, 1984.

Williams, William Carlos. "Sermon with a Camera." Literature and Photography: Interactions 1840-1990.
Ed. Jane M. Rabb. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1995. 309-312.

CAROLINE BLINDER is a lecturer in English and American Literature at Goldsmiths College,

University of London. She is the author of A Self-made Surrealist: Ideology and Aesthetics in the Work
of Henry Miller (2000) plus articles on Surrealism, twentieth- century American photography,
Fascism, and writing in the 1930s. She is currently completing a book on the intersections between
writing and photography between 1934 and 1959.

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