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Walker Evans

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[Lunchroom Window, New York], 1929. Walker Evans (American, 1903–1975). Gelatin silver print. Gift of Arnold H. Crane, 1971 (1971.646.35)
More about Walker Evans
Born in St. Louis in 1903, Walker Evans was raised in Kenilworth, a Chicago suburb, and in Toledo, Ohio. Educated at Andover and Williams College, Evans developed a love of contemporary literature—especially for Joyce and Eliot—and for the French modernists, Baudelaire and Flaubert. His passion for literature, coupled with a resentment of authority and academic conventionality, impelled Evans to abandon the classroom for the streets and cafés of Paris in 1926. He returned to New York the following year intent on becoming a writer, but by 1928 he had also taken up photography.


His Early Years as a Photographer

His Career in the 1930s

Creating Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

His Work for Time and Fortune Magazines

In Later Life



His Early Years as a Photographer
To make ends meet, Evans tried advertising photography, which he found vapid. Supporting himself with odd jobs, he taught himself to use the camera as a writer uses a pen—to inscribe the meaning of what he saw around him. His early photographic projects, some commissioned, some self-motivated, examined aspects of contemporary American life and its environment—the streets of New York, Victorian architecture in New England, the Brooklyn Bridge. He made abstract compositions of electric signs, sidewalk displays, and shadows cast by elevated train platforms, and documented the city with the combined interests of the historian and the anthropologist. Evans found in these subjects an authentic expression of what was most American about America, and his lasting achievement was to express that sense of indigenous national character in his photographs. He wanted his work, as he once said, to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent."

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His Career in the 1930s
In the early 1930s, Evans was hired to make photographs in Cuba for Carleton Beals's book The Crime of Cuba (1933), an exposé of the conditions under which Cubans lived during the oppressive dictatorship of Machado y Morales. It was in Havana that the young photographer captured some of his first images of poverty, destitution, and despair, and also made his first great portraits of working people.

From 1935 to 1937, Evans worked for Roosevelt's New Deal Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration, photographing in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In the process of producing images that met the project's goal—alerting America's increasingly urban society to the condition of the rural poor in the midst of the Depression—Evans achieved with clarity and precision his self-assigned mission: to define his subject with an educated awareness of what it is, and to describe it with such simplicity and certainty that the result seems an unchallengeable fact untainted by opinion. Possessing an inherent grace and structure, his photographs of shop fronts, barbershops, and rural homes are rich in details of daily life and, at times, of desperate need.

In 1938, a selection from his first decade of work was exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and published as American Photographs, a 20th-century classic that is still in print. From 1938 to 1941, Evans photographed people in the New York subways, "the ladies and gentlemen of the jury." Caught unaware by a camera hidden inside Evans's jacket, the faces of New York's underground travelers are worthy of Dickens or Daumier. Evans published this series in 1966 as Many Are Called.

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Creating Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
With the writer James Agee, Evans created a written and photographic portrait of cotton tenant farmers in the South, which became the seminal book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Its portraits of the Burroughs family—a sharecropper, his wife, and children-and pictures of their home in Hale County, Alabama, are today among the iconic images of the century. These photographs, all dating from the summer of 1936, were featured in a special gallery dedicated to this unparalleled collaboration between writer and photographer.

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His Work for Time and Fortune Magazines
Evans worked for Time magazine (1943-45) and later for Fortune magazine (1945-65) as a special photographic editor, producing some forty portfolios and photographic essays, many in color, often self-assigned and with his own accompanying text. The pictures made for Fortune—of railroad company insignias, downtown Chicago, common tools, a Mississippi riverfront town in Kentucky, and views of America from a train window—exhibit the simplicity and intelligence that are the essence of Evans's style. The exhibition included a large selection of the original Fortune magazines, black-and-white prints produced for the portfolios, and an extensive series of color images shown on a video screen.

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In Later Life
After his retirement from Fortune, Evans taught photography at Yale University. He also disseminated his understanding of the humbler modes of graphic art and commercial display as essential forms of popular art by exhibiting and lecturing on his collections of roadside signs and picture postcards.

In 1973 and 1974, Evans worked with the just-released SX-70 Polaroid instant camera, returning to some of his most important themes—portraiture, architecture, and signs. The exhibition concluded with a selection of approximately fifty of these small but potent studies of color and form, dense condensations of a people's vital spirit and an artist's brilliant life work.

Walker Evans died in 1975.

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