I took some mail order catalogs from a recycling bin, cut a pink rose from one of them, and pasted it into the sink in the black-and-white picture with the grim flowered wallpaper. 

Did these quiet black-and-white pictures really need any sass from me?

The God of my youth needed nothing from me but silence and obedience. Was art like that too? In junk and in books, I found things that needed me to see them, to salvage, complete, or renew them, however imperfect my attempts.

Lionel Trilling, exemplar of perfect taste, wrote of the perfect taste of Walker Evans’ photos, the “tact, delicacy of feeling, complete awareness, and complete respect.”

Yes, indeed, but didn’t that also sound like something you’d say about a mortician who’d done a good job with a particularly ugly corpse?

Clement Greenberg appreciated Evans’ ability “to be sincere without being honest.”