part v

THE CASE OF THE INAPPROPRIATE ALARM CLOCK

By Errol Morris
THE WINDING YEARS OF HEAVEN

…that there can be be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: that this square home, as it stands in unshadowed earth between the winding years of heaven, is, not to me but of itself, one among the serene and final, uncapturable beauties of existence.

— James Agee, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”

William Stott’s “Documentary Expression and Thirties America” is a scholarly attempt to fit F.S.A. photography within a broader context. Hilton Kramer in The Times Book Review called it “…a comprehensive inquiry into the attitudes and ambitions that characterized the documentary impulse of the thirties.” Stott was a graduate student and a teacher at Yale, and it was there that he first met Evans. We started our phone conversation with a discussion of James Curtis and Walker Evans.

ERROL MORRIS: In your review of “Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth” you write, “Curtis thinks all manipulation is the same.” That he wants to lump all the F.S.A. photographers into one big pile and, in particular, he wants to prove that Walker Evans is guilty of manipulation........

pic: library of congress

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