Walker Evans's "counter-aesthetic"

Afterimage, July-August, 2003 by Jane Tormey

Critical judgement derives from a determination of values, guided by an assumed need for impartiality. In an argument for more uncertain "performative dimensions of meaning production," Amelia Jones (20) gives an account of the absorption of Kant's notion of "disinterestedness," which "requires impartiality and a pose of neutrality (a repression and veiling of desire) on the part of the interpreter." Kant defined a difference between lack of interest, disinterest, and subjective investment that provoked the premise of the "polarity of objectivity and subjectivity." (21) Art history has assumed the original notion of "disinterest" and re-submerged it in an investment in expectations, hierarchies, and tradition, revalidating aesthetic value and giving credibility and certainty by reiterating that established value.

The habitual aim is to avoid producing "embodied, sensate, interested, contingent and therefore individualised and non universal judgements." (22) If one applies this last description to these late portraits, one can see that this is exactly what is being produced. Work that is partial, subjective, particular, and in some instances incidental, irrelevant, and very ordinary Photographic work such as Evans's, and more recently Nan Goldin's, (23) employ and rely on the contingent and non-universal, Goldin deliberately and Evans unwittingly. They affirm the object, the other, and the subject, leaving reason aside and including subjectivity by using both objective reason and subjectivity in the process. Is what is happening in these images confounding our certainty by not allowing us to "repress our desire," by means of the photographer not successfully repressing his desire? The failure to repress desire is concomitant with the degree of rawness. "For Kant, it is the aesthetic that must bridge the chasm of contradictions opened between the 'subjective' and the 'universal." (24) It is in this "chasm" that Evans falls. His carelessness, both in the nature of the posing and in the manner of taking, questions the uncertainty of the images' inherent worth as a result of their dependence on the subjectivity of desire, rather than the disinterestedness of the artist's objective vision.