Contempt for / Walker Evans

12 26 37 NYC

men who try to fascinate women with their minds;

gourmets, liberals, cultivated women;

writers;

successful writers who use the left to buttress their standing;

the sex life of America;

limited editions, "atmosphere," Bennington College, politics;

men of my generation who became photographers during the depression;

journalism, new dealers, readers of the New Yorker;

the corner of Madison Avenue. and 56h street;

the public;

Richard Wagner, radio announcers;
hobbies and hobbyists;

the soul of Josef von Sternberg;

the gay seventies, eighties, nineties, or hundreds;

art in America, the artist of America, the art lovers of America, the art patrons of America, the art museums of America, the art directors of America, the wives and mistresses and paramours of the artists of America, the etchings and the christmas cards and the woodcuts and the paintings and the letters and the memoirs and the talk and the beards or the cleanshaven faces of the artists of America;

for college bred intellectual communists with private incomes;

for safe experimentation in living or in expression;

for merrie England;

for critics;

for passing away, passing on, going on, leaving us; instead of dying;

for school spirit, Christmas spirit, gallant spirit, and whatever is meant by The American Spirit

Walker Evans, Self portrait 1930's