Walker Evans

Beauties of the common tool is a portfolio by Walker Evans, commissioned by Fortune Magazine and originally published in 1955.

‘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.

Who was Walker Evans?

Walker Evans began to photograph in the late 1920s, making snapshots during a European trip. Upon his return to New York, he published his first images in 1930. During the Great Depression, Evans began to photograph for the Resettlement Administration, documenting workers and architecture in the South-eastern states. In 1936, he travelled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine. The book ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men’ came out of this collaboration.

Walker Evans would produce his photographs in black and white, with a black frame around them. The tools would also be resting on a white background, so the tools would stand out more and look much bolder. This white background also creates negative space in his photographs, which causes all the viewers attention to be directly on the single tool, as there is nothing else to distract from it.

Darren Harvey-Regan

Darren Harvey-Regan was a photographer, who was interested in the concept that photographs do not exist just to show things, but are physical things that become objects themselves. The Ravestijn Gallery presented his work. Harvey-Regan finds photography that photographs objects, whilst in itself being an object, interesting as a concept.

‘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.

Who inspired Darren Harvey-Regan?

In 1955, Fortune magazine published, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, a portfolio by Walker Evans featuring pictures of ordinary hand-made tools, such as a ratchet wrench and a pair of scissors. This inspired Harvey-Regan, so he first constructed a montage of Evans’s images to make new forms. He then sourced matching tools, cut them in half and re-joined various halves together, with the resulting physical objects being photographed to create his final work. The montaged tools become 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.

Harvey’s Work

The exhibition includes ‘The Halt’ which is when a real axe pins the photograph to the wall, and ‘When is an image Not an image’, in which a trompe l’oeil effect occurs. It is an image comprised of surfaces and shadows, which is mounted on a block, two sides of which have a 45 degree outward bevel, meaning they are easily viewed, whilst the positioning of a spot-light on an adjacent wall creates a shadow on the remaining sides, completing the work’s ‘frame’.

Harvey-Regan refers to the works as ‘phrasings’, which is different versions of a visual question or proposition. He further elaborates: “If you take, ‘what happens if’…” as the beginning of the exhibition’s question, then the works explore how that question ends, by using the elements of the photographic material, the image, and the original object and shuffling these three around, giving different emphasis to each, in which each has a different phrasing”.