Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975
Evans began taking photographs in 1928, using a small handheld camera. In 1929 he began a lifelong friendship with Lincoln Kirstein (1907-1997), then still a student at Harvard but already a force in American cultural criticism. In 1930 Evans's first publication of photographs appeared in a book of poetry by Hart Crane (The Bridge). He began to photograph nineteenth-century American houses, investing his subject with the descriptive, archival interest in vernacular detail that would characterize much of his later work. These works were influenced by the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose work Evans saw for the first time in 1930.
Evans's first commissioned work dates from 1933, with his documentation of the political unrest in Cuba. Around this time, he began to work with an eight-by-ten view camera. In 1935 Evans made his first expedition to the southern United States, and began to photograph antebellum architecture. In the summer and fall of that year he also took photographs for the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration, or FSA) in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and the South.
In 1936 the writer James Agee requested that Evans take the photographs to accompany a photo-essay on sharecroppers, which had been commissioned by Fortune Magazine. Agee and Evans stayed with three sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama, for three weeks during the summer of 1936. Agee's article on the experience was rejected by Fortune. In 1941, an expanded version of the article, along with Evans's photographs, was published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Public attention was then focused on the war, however, and it was not until 1960, with the publication of another edition of the book, which included an expanded section of photographs, that the joint work met with great success.
After the 1930s' photographs of the rural South, Evans continued to explore photography as a medium for addressing and framing subjects of modern life. He used the large-view camera less frequently, replacing it with a two and one-quarter twin-lens reflex camera and a 35 mm camera. He took photographs in the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat (1938; published in 1966 as Many Are Called); and industrial landscapes from the window of a moving train (1950).
In 1938 Evans's photographs were the subject of the first solo exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1971 John Szarkowski organized a retrospective there of Evans's work. Walker Evans died on 10 April 1975 in New Haven.
