Walker Evans influenced Darren Harvey-Regan heavily, and both artists paid careful attention to choice of objects, composition, lighting and exposure values.

Their choice of objects were ‘beauties of the common tool’, meaning objects such a wrenches, hammers and other similar things.

WHO IS WALKER EVANS?

“Among low-priced, factory-produced goos, none is so appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, a hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear ‘undesigned’ forms.”

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist. He began to photograph in the late 1920s, making snapshots during a European trip. He is very well known for his work for the FSA, documenting the effects of the Great Depression.

His portfolio ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’ was published originally in 1955.

Although the objects alone would seem to be lifeless and plain, Evans played with the angles of the lighting and exposure ton give a different perspective on each tool. He played with the positioning of shadow too, making the images more interesting.

Each tool tells a story about life during the Great Depression and how they played important roles for people struggling to make a livelihood.

WHO IS DARREN HARVEY-REGAN?

“It’s a means of transposing material into other material, adding new meaning or thoughts in the process. I think photographing materials is a way to consider the means of creating meaning, and it’s a tactile process with which I feel involved. Touching and moving and making are my engagement with the world and my art”.

Darren Harvey-Regan was a photographer interested in the idea that photographs do not exist just to show things, but are physical things that become objects themselves.

He was heavily inspired by Walker Evans. When Evans portfolio was published by Fortune magazine in 1955, Harvey-Regan constructed a montage of Walker Evans’ portfolio to create new forms.

He then sourced matching tools, cut them in half and re-joined several halves together, with the resulting physical objects being photographed to create his work.

The montaged tools became both beautiful and bizarre objects, in which a ratchet wrench is combined with a pair of pliers and a Mason’s trowel joined with a pair of scissors. This made it stand out from the rest as the strangeness made it more eye-catching.

He named his work ‘Beauties of the Common Tool, Rephrased II, 2013’.

He took the story that Walker Evans represented and rearranged it, modernising it.