By Fred Camper
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Evans had grown up in Kansas City, Missouri, where her parents ran a photography studio. They gave her a little box camera when she was young, but she was more interested in drawing. She remembers a junior high art teacher who took the class outside to do watercolors. “She showed us how light was a part of the subject and how working with watercolor you could leave the paper white and the whiteness of it could show light. This was the first time I started realizing that when I looked around me I was looking not just at trees against a background or trees that are separate from each other, but at this whole unified field of light and dark and different colors. That’s when I began to understand anything at all about pictures, and how the world is sort of woven together.” She felt “this sudden rush of excitement, of feeling completely vibrant.”
Painting and drawing were Evans’s main artistic pursuits through high school and college. Abstraction reigned at the University of Kansas, but she says, “I didn’t have any passion for abstract art. I was trying to do it because that’s what I was supposed to be doing, but I just could not convince myself that this mattered very much.” It was the 60s, and she wanted to make a difference in the world. In 1968 Robert Kennedy came to the campus, and Evans borrowed her father’s camera and went to take pictures of him. “The Vietnam war, a presidential election, Martin Luther King and civil rights–it was terribly exciting to be young and embroiled in this,” she says. It was then she realized she could make pictures that mattered, “that involved a relationship with the world instead of just with my own imagination. That, in fact, was the end of my painting. I finished up my coursework but otherwise I never painted again.” Instead she started teaching photography to disadvantaged girls, then began photographing Kansas’s rural and urban poor.
The photos of the Joliet Arsenal, where most explosives production stopped in 1976, include a triptych of a gatehouse. “It’s clearly abandoned,” says Evans. “There are cracks in the concrete around it. It needs a coat of paint. The landscaping around it is bushes and shrubbery that were obviously intentionally planted there, presumably when the building was constructed. Now you can see the bushes growing too high, and you can see these redbud trees still there, yet the grass is getting tall around them. The whole scene looks very untended. Nature had been controlled in a certain way, then the people finished their story there and left–and it seems nature has become a sort of equal partner again.”
