Walker Evans - Polaroids - 2001

Walker Evans: Polaroids is a seminal photo book published by Scalo in 2001 (and widely distributed in 2002), edited by Jeff L. Rosenheim. The book captures the final artistic chapter of Walker Evans—one of the most influential American documentary photographers of the 20th century.

In 1973, when Evans was 70 years old, frail, and battling severe illness, the Polaroid company gave him its innovative new SX-70 camera along with an unlimited supply of film. Evans became completely fascinated by the immediacy of the medium. He famously remarked, "Nobody should touch a Polaroid until he's over sixty," implying that the simplicity of the machine required a lifetime of refined artistic judgment to truly master. Before his death in 1975, Evans shot roughly 2,500 instant photographs with the device.

The book compiles nearly 300 carefully selected, mostly unpublished images from those final 2,500 photos. Leaving behind complex darkroom techniques, Evans used the point-and-shoot nature of the SX-70 to reduce photography to its bare essentials: seeing and choosing. He returned to his lifelong obsession with everyday American culture—specifically commercial signs, posters, and urban ephemera.

A major focal point of his final years was a projected, but ultimately unmade, "alphabet book". Evans took hundreds of tightly cropped photos of individual graphic letters found on streets and buildings, seeking to treat photography as a self-contained language system.

Unlike the stark, black-and-white social documentary work that defined his career during the Great Depression, these Polaroids embrace luminous, slightly muted color, close-up fragments, and poetic abstraction.

The physical design of the book heavily reflects Evans’s own aesthetic preferences, directly tracking a sample page layout that he created before he died. It is an elegant hardcover volume bound in silver cloth, spanning 336 pages with 265 color illustrations.

Copy in very good condition.