cover image Walker's Way: My Years with Walker Evans

Walker's Way: My Years with Walker Evans

Isabelle Storey, . . PowerHouse, $29.95 (263pp) ISBN 978-1-57687-362-5

They met in 1959. Storey, Swiss and quite continental, newly wed, on her first trip to America, was 26; Evans, the famous photographer, was 30 years older. “He seemed to be endowed with everything I liked: charm, taste, style, an unerring eye, humor, and intelligence,” Storey writes. By the time her husband returned from out of town, she “had fallen in love.” Although speckled with famous names and hints of mutual sexual dysfunction, this is a dry, quotidian recounting of Storey and Evans's doomed romance. There is much cooking and eating but little tasting, reading but little reflection, historical markers but little involvement. The memoir contains more than 50 photographs, but nothing from Evans's renowned Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , reprinted with fanfare in 1960. A future biographer may find the sterile detail (“I went to the dry cleaner and shopped for supper”) useful, the brief exchange of letters touching and small notes about photographers' rivalries informing, but both Evans and Storey would have been better served through more aesthetically placed photographs and far fewer words. 50 b&w photos. (Oct.)