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No less careful and scarcely less packed with historical truth is Evans' treatment of The Automobile: a junk yard of jalopies and car bodies at the foot of a beautiful country slope (see cut); a boy and girl, date 1932, in a second-hand roadster at a small-town curb.
For journalistic photographers, the ostensible recorders of their time, publication of this solitary uncommercial work provided a high standard and a lesson. The lesson: photographs "for the record" may well be trash unless taken with an artist's selective eye, a thinker's grasp of meanings. Because documentary work is now widely recognized as the native province and most promising form of photography, supplanting the slick pictorial school long dominated by Edward Steichen, Walker Evans' show and book this week appeared to be the most significant event for the photographic art since Steichen went out of business.