Lyric Documentary, Folk Documents

Full Article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/arts/design/06evan.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

From Page 2:
"The postcards also gave Evans a handle for his own achievement. In 1964, in a lecture on his postcard collection at Yale, he coined the phrase “lyric documentary,” and immediately applied it to his art. He defined the term as a celebration of fact subtly modulated by an artist’s innate style, and as a rejection of Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs, which he considered strained and called “decadent lyric.” The marvelous photo-album-like book accompanying the Met show includes a transcript of the lecture along with reproductions of the postcards Evans used as illustration.

Evans traced the history of “lyric documentary” to Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, forward through Palladio and Henry James to his hero Eugène Atget, the French photographer. In the lecture, Evans called Atget “the supreme lyric documentary photographer,” an understandable accolade. Evans’s postcard collection is a found, Atget-like account of America."