Photographie

Frederick H. Evans

The gift of seeing

1895–1912

I cannot say exactly where I first met Evans. He broke in upon me from several directions simultaneously; and some time passed before I co-ordinated all the avatars into one and the same man. He was in many respects an oddity. He imposed on me as a man of fragile health, to whom an exciting performance of a Beethoven Symphony was as disastrous as a railway collision to an ordinary Philistine, until I discovered that his condition never prevented him from doing anything he really wanted to do, and that the things he wanted to do and did would have worn out a navvy in three weeks. Again, he imposed on me as a poor man, struggling in a modest lodging to make a scanty income in a brutal commercial civilization for which his organization was far too delicate. But a personal examination of the modest lodging revealed the fact that this Franciscan devotee of poverty never seemed to deny himself anything he really cared for. It is true that he had neither a yacht, nor a couple of Panhard cars, nor a liveried domestic staff, nor even, as far as I could ascertain, a Sunday hat. But you could spend a couple of hours easily in the modest lodging looking at treasures, and then stop only from exhaustion.

[…] But where did the anchorite’s money come from? Well, the fact is, Evans, like Richardson, kept a shop; and the shop kept him. It was a book-shop. Not a place where you could buy slate-pencils, and reporter’s note-books, and string and sealing-wax and paper-knives, with a garnish of ready-reckoners, prayer-books, birthday Shakespeare, and sixpenny editions of the Waverley novels; but a genuine book-shop and nothing else, in the heart of the ancient city of London, half-way between the Mansion House and St. Paul’s. It was jam full of books. The window was completely blocked up with them, so that the interior was dark; you could see nothing for the first second or so after you went in, though you could feel the stands of books you were tumbling over. Evans, lurking in the darkest corner at the back, acquired the habits and aspect of an aziola; the enlargement of his eyes is clearly visible in Mrs. Kasebier’s fine portrait of him. Everybody who knows Evans sees in those eyes the outward and visible sign of his restless imagination, and says “You have that in the portraits of William Blake, too”; but I am convinced that he got them by watching for his prey in the darkness of that busy shop.

The shop was an important factor in Evans’s artistic career; and I believe it was the artist’s instinct of self-preservation that made him keep it. The fact that he gave it up as soon as it had made him independent of it shows that he did not like business for its own sake. But to live by business was only irksome, whilst to live by art would have been to him simply self-murder. The shop was the rampart behind which the artist could do what he liked, and the man (who is as proud as Lucifer) maintain his independence.

[…] His decisive gift is, of course, the gift of seeing: his picture-making is done on the screen; and if the negative does not reproduce that picture, it is a failure, because the delicacies he delights in can not be faked: he relies on pure photography, not as a doctrinaire, but as an artist working on that extreme margin of photographic subtlety at which attempts to doctor the negative are worse than useless. He does not reduce, and only occasionally and slightly intensifies; and platinotype leaves him but little of his “control” which enables the gummist so often to make a virtue of a blemish and a merit of a failure. If the negative does not give him what he saw when he set up his camera, he smashes it. Indeed, a moment’s examination of the way his finest portraits are modelled by light alone and not by such contour markings or impressionist touches as a retoucher can imitate, or of his cathedral interiors, in which the obscurest detail in the corners seems as delicately pencilled by the darkness as the flood of sunshine through window or open door is pencilled by the light, without a trace of halation or over-exposure, will convince any expert that he is consummate at all points, as artist and negative-maker no less than as printer. And he has the ”luck” which attends the born photographer. He is also an enthusiastic user of the Dallmeyer-Bergheim lens; but you have only to turn over a few of the portraits he has taken with a landscape-lens to see that if he were limited to an eighteenpenny spectacle-glass and a camera improvised from a soap-box, he would get better results than less apt photographers could achieve with a whole optical laboratory at their disposal.

The gift of seeing
"A Sea of Steps", Wells Cathedral, Stairs to Chapter House and Bridge to Vicar's Close, 1903
The gift of seeing
Blois, Parliament Hall, c.1906
The gift of seeing
Bourges Cathedral, Portal of West Front, c.1901
The gift of seeing
Bourges, Across Choir, 1899
The gift of seeing
Church at Autun, c.1906
The gift of seeing
Durham Cathedral, 1912
The gift of seeing
Durham Cathedral, Nave of Aisle, c.1911
The gift of seeing
Le Puy, St. Michael’s, c.1906
The gift of seeing
Ely Cathedral, An Octagon Arch, c.1899
The gift of seeing
Ely Cathedral, Chapel of Bishop, 1897–1900
The gift of seeing
Gloucester Cathedral, Cloisters, South and West Alleys, c.1900
The gift of seeing
Lincoln Cathedral, Stairway In S.W. Turret, 1895
The gift of seeing
Mont St. Michel, Cloisters, 1906
The gift of seeing
Wells Cathedral, North Transept, c.1903
The gift of seeing
Wells Cathedral, South Nave Aisle to West, c.1903
The gift of seeing
Westminster Abbey, Across Aisle Nave, 1911
The gift of seeing
Westminster Abbey, East End, South Ambulatory, 1911
The gift of seeing
Westminster Abbey, Entrance to Chapel of Henry VII, 1911
The gift of seeing
Westminster Abbey, South Nave Aisle to West, 1911
The gift of seeing
Westminster Abbey, South Side Henry VII Chapel, 1911
The gift of seeing
Westminster Abbey, Confessor's Chapel, Staircase on North Side, 1911
The gift of seeing
Winchester, Details of Nave Roof & Clerestory, 1900
The gift of seeing
York Minster, “In Sure and Certain Hope”, 1902
Lieu: Western Europe

Collection: Philadelphia Museum of Art - The J. Paul Getty Museum - Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Text: George Bernard Shaw, Evans — An Appreciation, 1903


Publié: Janvier 2024
Catégorie: Photographie

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