In the early twentieth century, Evan’s grandfather started a family tradition of sending teenagers to the Land of Israel. The summer Evan was sent there, he photographed two Jewish children who had fled North Africa, a little boy and girl holding hands, walking an uneven path between shacks in a refugee camp near Haifa. He made the first print in the darkroom his father had set up for the boys in one of the bathrooms of their Brooklyn brownstone. Later he used a wash of bright acrylic to change the drab background and let the children walk between streams of colour that parted for them.
Evan was always attracted to mythic stories. In an epic poem, everything is possible, and the hero can be both refined and fierce. Between his apartment in Vancouver and the Asian grocery downstairs lived a well-known poet who was delicate and feared many things. She was glad Evan lived upstairs. Once, when she was very afraid, Evan showed her how to dance holding a large knife like an epic hero. The poet found that it is nearly impossible to feel afraid when you are dancing with a large knife.
An immigrant named Boris Gork recognized photography as art and thought the public would be caught up in Evan’s visions. Boris rented a storefront and turned it into the Boris Gork Gallery, cleaning and painting the walls white, installing lights, printing invitations and posters. Then they hung Opening Myth, a photographic collage, three by four feet, to greet visitors when they stepped into the gallery. A negative printing of the ancient walls of Acco framed abstractions of reversed black and white, indistinct images that could be people or animals. There might have been a treetop or a sword or a flag flying from a citadel. In this photographic tapestry, nothing was certain, and everything was suggested and possible.
The show was a critical but not a commercial success, so Boris closed the gallery and went on to other ventures. Evan continued making wooden frames for other artists. But the myth went on opening inside Evan’s studio, hidden from public view but permeating his days as an artist. He walked alone through winding dark passages and climbed severe, semi-tumbled ramparts into light.
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