Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’s work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.
Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman Museum.
Table of Contents
- 1 Biography
- 1.1 Early life
- 1.2 Depression-era photography
- 1.3 Later work
- 1.4 Death and legacy
- 1.5 Walker Evans: Starting from Scratch
- 1.6 Walker Evans: American Photographs: Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition
- 1.7 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families
- 1.8 Walker Evans: No Politics
- 1.9 Walker Evans Racing 6 Lug Matte Black Wheel Center Caps Qty 1# WKR-9706SB with Screws
- 1.10 Walker Evans: The Magazine Work
- 1.11 Walker Evans: Signs (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum)
- 1.12 Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye
- 1.13 Walker Evans: Aperture Masters of Photography (The Aperture Masters of Photography Series)
- 1.14 Walker Evans America
Biography
Early life
He was born in St. Louis, Missouri to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker Evans. His father was an advertising director. Walker was raised in an thriving environment; he spent his puberty in Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and New York City. He attended the Loomis Institute and Mercersburg Academy, then graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1922. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College, spending much of his times in the school’s library, before dropping out. He returned to New York and worked as a night attendant in the map room of the Public Library. After spending a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to the United States to connect a teacher and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were along with his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm upon Wall Street from 1927 to 1929.
Evans took going on photography in 1928 with suggestion to the times he was vivacious in Ossining, New York. His influences included Eugène Atget and August Sander. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. In 1931, he made a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston vicinity sponsored by Lincoln Kirstein.
In May and June 1933, Evans took photographs in Cuba upon assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals’ The Crime of Cuba (1933), a “strident account” of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. There, Evans drank nightly behind Ernest Hemingway, who lent him grant to extend his two-week stay an additional week. His photographs documented street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and additional waterfront scenes. He furthermore helped Hemingway Get photos from newspaper chronicles that documented some of the political shout abuse Hemingway described in To Have and Have Not (1937). Fearing that his photographs might be deemed necessary of the supervision and confiscated by Cuban authorities, he left 46 prints in the appearance of Hemingway. He had no difficulties with returning to the United States, and 31 of his photos appeared in Beals’ book. The cache of prints left taking into account Hemingway was discovered in Havana in 2002 and exhibited at an exhibition in Key West.
Depression-era photography
The Depression years of 1935–36 were ones of remarkable productivity and pretend for Evans. In 1935, Evans spent two months on a fixed-term photographic mix up in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He speedily parlayed this interim employment into a full-time approach as an “information specialist” in the Resettlement Administration (RA) (later Farm Security Administration), a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture. From October 1935 on, he continued to get photographic action for the RA and complex the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern United States.
In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, writer James Agee and he were sent by Fortune on assignment to Hale County, Alabama for a balance the magazine once opted not to run. In 1941, Evans’s photographs and Agee’s text detailing the duo’s stay similar to three White tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise well-known Men. Its detailed account of three cultivation families paints a severely moving portrait of rural poverty. Critic Janet Malcolm remarks that a contradiction existed along with a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee’s prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans’s photographs of sharecroppers.
The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the owners of the land upon which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were “Soviet agents”, although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd’s wife, recalled during well along interviews her discounting that information. Evans’s photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-era difficulty and poverty. In September 2005, Fortune revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th-anniversary issue. Charles Burroughs, who was four years old with Evans and Agee visited the family, was “still angry” at them for not even sending the relations a copy of the book; the son of Floyd Burroughs was next reportedly mad because the intimates was “cast in a buoyant that they couldn’t attain any better, that they were doomed, ignorant”.
Evans continued to performance for the FSA until 1938. That year, an exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs, was held at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was the first exhibition in the museum devoted to the take effect of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had befriended in his prematurely days in New York.
In 1938, Evans as a consequence took his first photographs in the New York City Subway as soon as a camera hidden in his coat. These were collected in cassette form in 1966 under the title Many Are Called. In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked afterward and mentored Helen Levitt.
Like such additional photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Evans rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes lonesome attaching handwritten notes to negatives later instructions upon some aspect of the printing procedure.
Later work
Evans was a enthusiastic reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time. Shortly afterward, he became an editor at Fortune through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography upon the talent for graphic design at the Yale University School of Art.
In one of his last photographic projects, Evans completed a black-and-white portfolio of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.’s offices and partners for notice in “Partners in Banking”, published in 1968 to celebrate the private bank’s 150th anniversary. In 1973 and 1974, Evans used the additional Polaroid SX-70 instant camera for his last work; the company provided him later an unquestionable supply of film, and the camera’s simplicity and readiness were easier for the aged photographer.
The first definitive retrospective of his photographs, which “individually evoke an incontrovertible desirability of specific places, and collectively a suitability of America”, according to a press release, was on view at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in early 1971. Selected by John Szarkowski, the exhibit was titled simply Walker Evans.
Death and legacy
Evans died at his apartment in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975. The last person Evans talked to was Hank O’Neal. In suggestion to the newly created A Vision Shared project, O’Neal recounts, “The picture on the assist of the book, of him taking a picture – he actually called me in the works and told me he had found it”. “And after that the next morning I got occurring and I had a phone call from Leslie Katz, who ran the Eakins Press. And Leslie said: ‘Isn’t it Awful about Walker Evans?’ And I said: ‘What are you talking about?’ He said: ‘He died last night.’ I said: ‘Cut it out. I talked to him last night twice’ … So an hour and a half after we had our conversation, he died. He had a conflict and died.”
In 1994, the estate of Walker Evans handed higher than its holdings to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for anything works of art in whatever media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of virtually 1,000 negatives in hoard of the Library of Congress, which were produced for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration; these works are in the public domain.
In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Last update 2021-08-06