Doorway, 204 West 13th Street, New York City, around 1931 Possibly 1931 - 1974

Walker Evans made this photograph of 204 West 13th Street, New York City, around 1931. The door sits flush with the brick facade, columns either side, a fancy number plate overhead. You get the sense Evans spent a good while finding the right angle, the right light, for this shot. I imagine him thinking about his predecessors, the Bechers perhaps, also obsessed with documenting architecture; or Atget with his Parisian shopfronts. But Evans is after something else, something less descriptive, more like portraiture. This door is presented to us as a kind of face, complete with a knocker for a nose. There's a tension here, between the cool, detached eye of the camera and the intimacy of the subject. But that’s what makes it. Like all great artists, Evans knew how to hold opposites in play. This is something I think about a lot in my own work, about push and pull, about how something is made.