Walker's Way: My Years with Walker Evans
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Walker's Way: My Years with Walker Evans Details
From Publishers Weekly They met in 1959. Storey, Swiss and quite continental, newly wed, on her first trip to America, was 26; Evans, the famous photographer, was 30 years older. He seemed to be endowed with everything I liked: charm, taste, style, an unerring eye, humor, and intelligence, Storey writes. By the time her husband returned from out of town, she had fallen in love. Although speckled with famous names and hints of mutual sexual dysfunction, this is a dry, quotidian recounting of Storey and Evans's doomed romance. There is much cooking and eating but little tasting, reading but little reflection, historical markers but little involvement. The memoir contains more than 50 photographs, but nothing from Evans's renowned Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, reprinted with fanfare in 1960. A future biographer may find the sterile detail (I went to the dry cleaner and shopped for supper) useful, the brief exchange of letters touching and small notes about photographers' rivalries informing, but both Evans and Storey would have been better served through more aesthetically placed photographs and far fewer words. 50 b&w photos. (Oct.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more About the Author Isabelle Storey was born in 1933 in Bern, Switzerland, and studied textile design at the Zurich School of Design and Applied Art, receiving her diploma in 1955. In 1958, she went to New York with her first husband, Alec von Steiger. Two years later she married Walker Evans; their marriage ended in divorce. In 1973, she married her current husband, James M. Storey, a lawyer. They divide their time between Boston and coastal Maine. As curator at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, she mounted the exhibition The Presence of Walker Evans, which gathered photographs by Diane Arbus, William Christenberry, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Helen Levitt, Alston Purvis, John Szarkowski, and Jerry Thompson. She was the photographic editor of A Book for Boston (David R. Godine, 1980). From 1980 to 1990 she served on the Board of The MacDowell Colony. Read more
Reviews
A beautifully written and breathtakingly honest book about art, love, and coming of age in the turbulent 1960's. Isabelle Storey's memoir about her youthful marriage to the much older, world- famous photographer is filled with sharp observations and vivid descriptions of places and people, including many of the artists and writers who defined the era. Ultimately, it is a voyage of self-discovery, a fascinating record of living through the exhilaration and confusion of changing times.
