Biography
Jonathan Evans (born 1951, New Haven) is an artist and photographer currently living in Los Angeles. His foundation in art-making and architecture grounds and enriches a career that has also encompassed urban planning and design and museum exhibition planning and development, while affording opportunities for extensive international travel.
A summer job during college, working on the publication of a portfolio of classic images by Walker Evans, provided Evans (no relation) a powerful initiation into the world of photography. Through composing and printing his photos at that time, Evans developed essential aspects of his two and three dimensional design sensibility. His childhood hobby of collecting postcards shifted to a focus on real photograph postcards and kindled an interest in vernacular photography, and its evolving relationship to our understanding of photographic art.
Work
Key aspects of Evans's work include: a sculptural sense of pictorial elements that often subvert a sense of the picturesque and emphasize unexpected juxtapositions; a frontality and axiality that imply a documentary approach but often depict disjunction; and a sense of the poetry that ordinary objects possess when liberated from their context.
Also present in some of Evans's work, especially his travel images, is a sense of sublimity that feature complex spatial imagery, densely packed with pictorial incidents, as well as compositions that tend toward painterly abstraction, often displaying a rich color palette.
His most recent series of views through construction site view panels - "windows" or "peepholes," synthesizes his interests in art and urbanism, focusing on the complexities of spatial representation. The images are consistently framed, and while the photographer indeed makes critical decisions, Evans considers the views to be "readymades" that often suggest installation artworks, sculptures, or paintings. In some, the front plane and the scene beyond collapse, yielding a unified planar image.
A sense of anticipation and surprise, embodied in the process of creating the picture, carry an erotic charge - stealing a look at something hidden. The pleasure is repeated in post-production where Evans utilizes limited image processing to explore the emergence and creation of a more compelling image.