Walker Evans at SFMOMA

I've been thinking a lot lately about limits, the crescendos of major and minor things, what's worth trying to make better and what's just fine the way it is, not try to improve and so on. I mean how much better can you make a grilled cheese sandwich than the grilled cheese at Outerlands? Yet on my way to the museum yesterday I walked past a restaurant on Market with a sign in the window proclaiming it served, the best grilled cheese sandwich in the world. 

Walker Evans didn't begin making art as a photographer, he began as a writer, and continued writing throughout his career. But at some point he must have felt some limit to his writing, that his writing didn't live up to how he thought of himself as an artist and that his photographs did. 

I saw the Walker Evans show on an empty stomach, which seemed the right thing to do, since the art he's best known for making consists of his photographs of poor Alabama farm families in the 1930's. For a time there was a woman who looked almost exactly like Allie Mae Burroughs, the Alabama woman who posed for the Evans photo that's become iconic, looking at the photos with me. I knew she knew what I was thinking--that she looked very much like Allie Mae Burroughs--but she didn't blink, she just kept looking.

There's a hallway leading into the Walker Evans show at SFMOMA of photographs made by photographers back in the days before photography was art--Sander, Atget and a few others. There's also a whole wall of Evans photographs side-by-side with Atget's in which you can see Atget's influence, as if Evans was not only trying to be as good as Atget by seeing what Atget saw but was also trying to see better. 

Perhaps we can't help but think of what makes something major or minor when we look at art, but this kind of looking doesn't necessarily make something major or minor, it's either one or the other all by itself. Whatever truth or beauty one gets from a work of art is unsurpassable, and lives forever in the realm of things that can't be improved.