Walker Evans

(b Saint Louis, MO, 3 Nov 1903; d New Haven, CT, 10 April 1975). American photographer and writer. He grew up in Kenilworth, a suburb of Chicago, but moved to New York with his mother after his parents separated. Primarily interested in literature, he sat in on lectures at the Sorbonne in Paris (1926-7), visited museums and bookshops, and thought of becoming a writer. In 1928 he acquired a camera and, out of frustration over his inability to find work and develop a literary means of expression, he decided to become a photographer. Intermittent assignments instigated by friends such as Lincoln Kirstein made it possible for him to live a bohemian life in Greenwich Village, where he met the writers Hart Crane (1899-1932) and James Agee (1909-55) and the artist Ben Shahn, with whom he worked and shared a house for a short time. Within this circle he found his early influences.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

An American photographer, Walker Evans (1903-1975) was best known for his photographs of American life between the world wars. Everyday objects and people - the urban and rural poor, abandoned buildings, storefronts, street signs, and the like - are encapsulated in his laconic images of the 1930s and 1940s.

Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 3, 1903. His family moved to Toledo, Ohio, shortly after his birth but eventually settled in Kenilworth, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, where his father worked as a successful member of an advertising firm. Walker attended several private schools, graduating in 1922 from Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, with the ambition to become a writer. He attended Williams College but dropped out after his freshman year.

With an allowance from his father, Evans in 1926 moved to Paris, along with other hopeful American expatriot writers bent on absorbing the artistic and intellectual climate of avant-garde postwar Europe. Yet, in Evans' own words, "I wanted so much to write that I couldn't write a word."

Back in the United States in 1928 he turned to photography and instantly felt at home in that medium. Entering the active field of American photography at the end of the 1920s, Evans was confronted with the two dominant modes of the moment, the "artistic" posture of Alfred Stieglitz and what Evans considered the blatantly "commercial" approach of Edward Steichen, both positions rejected by Evans in favor of, in his own words, "the elevated expression, the literate, authoritative, and transcendant statement which a photograph allows." In other words, he looked for something more than the esthetic or the commercial aspects of photography. He aimed for visual statements alluding to stories and values beyond the literal or the artistic.

During the early years of his career he supported himself with an assortment of jobs in New York City, where he became friends with several men who were themselves to become distinguished writers. For example, Hart Crane, a friend, published Evans' first work in The Bridge (1930). In 1931 the photographer worked with the critic Lincoln Kirstein, who published some of Evans' work in Hound and Horn, an avant garde magazine covering modernist thought and art around 1930.

The first exhibition of the photographer's production was at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932, and during the following year many of his pictures were used to illustrate The Crime of Cuba, Carleton Beal's study of social conditions in Cuba. From 1935 to 1937 Evans worked with a group of sociologists and photographers in a study of poverty in the United States during the Great Depression sponsored by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This mid-to-late 1930s period was the most productive and photographically successful time of his life.

The quality of Evans' work gained wide recognition in 1938 with an exhibition in New York City's Museum of Modern Art and publication of American Photographs, an important book on the history of photography. In an introductory essay, Lincoln Kirstein characterized American photography in general and Walker Evans' work in particular when he wrote in this 1938 publication that "the use of the visual arts to show us our own moral and economic situation has almost completely fallen into the hands of the photographer … and [Walker Evans') pictures with all their clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur, [is a] vision of a continent as it is, not as it might be or as it was."

On leave from FSA in 1936 Evans collaborated with James Agee on assignment from Fortune magazine in a study of the life of Southern sharecroppers. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) was seen in the later decades as one of the best of the crop of social commentaries of the period.

From 1945 until 1965 Evans was an associate editor of Fortune, and from 1965 until his death in 1975 he taught a course at Yale University, which he called "Seeing."

Walker Evans' work is impossible to categorize neatly; it has little of the meticulous composition of the formalist, none of the literary quality of the photographic storyteller, and exhibits no signs of the noisy punch of the photojournalist. His subjects, seen generally from eye level, have the uncontaminated, clear vision of an observant youngster, a Huck Finn perception of America in the 1930s. His work implies the complex of values, judgments, hopes, and fantasies that brought the particular subject into existence.

Further Reading

Walker Evans: American Photographs, with an introductory essay by Lincoln Kirstein and published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, remains a central work for the understanding of the photographer's view of his subject. Walker Evans, with an introduction by John Szarkowski and also published by the Museum of Modern Art (1971), provides an excellent contemporary view of his work. Leslie Katz's "Interview with Walker Evans" (1971), included in Vicki Goldberg, Photography in Print (1981), provides a great deal of insight into Evans as a person. Walker Evans at Work (1982) is a useful collection of letters, interviews, and photographs.

Additional Sources

Mora, Gilles, Walker Evans: the hungry eye, New York: H.N. Abrams, 1993.

Rathbone, Belinda, Walker Evans: a biography, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

For more information on Walker Evans, visit Britannica.com.

Evans, Walker (1903-75), often considered the leading American documentary photographer of the 20th century. From a prosperous Chicago family, he attended exclusive New England schools and the Sorbonne in Paris, where he first became interested in photography. Using a small hand-held camera, he began photographing regularly as a freelancer in New York in 1928, focusing on street scenes and 19th-century houses. By 1933 he had exhibited at the John Becker Gallery with Margaret Bourke-White and at MoMA, New York, the first of more than 30 shows dedicated to his work by 1995. In the early 1930s he lived in Greenwich Village with the painter-photographer Ben Shahn. Thus he had an established reputation as a photographer when he became one of the first staff photographers hired by Roy Stryker in 1935 for the ‘Historical Section’ of the Resettlement Administration (RA), which became in 1937 the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Evans's early influence helped Stryker to understand and articulate the vision of ‘documentary photography’ that dominated the FSA files, even though Evans himself refused to accept the label of ‘documentary’ to describe what he regarded as photographic art using a ‘documentary’ style. His work with the FSA was episodic: he disliked taking directions from Stryker, and was unwilling to keep accurate records of his expenses for the bureaucracy (to the despair of the secretaries). Stryker discharged him in the autumn of 1937, ostensibly for budgetary reasons, although he rehired him briefly in 1938. Between FSA assignments, under contract with Fortune magazine, he took a series of photographs of Alabama sharecroppers which were never published by the magazine; these later became the basis of his best-known work in collaboration with the poet James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). He was associate editor and photographer for Fortune magazine 1945-65, when he retired from professional photography, although he continued to photograph on a freelance basis, and to teach as professor of graphic arts at Yale University (1964-75).

Evans primarily used a 20.3 × 25.4 cm (8 × 10 in) camera while working for the FSA, but occasionally worked with a 35 mm Leica for informal shots of people, and with the Graflex Speed Graphic press camera. Best known for his direct and transparent black-and-white images (although he argued that he was actually working with shades of grey), at the end of his career he also worked with colour, and even developed an interest in the instant colour photography possible with the Polaroid SX-70.

MoMA mounted an Evans retrospective in 1971 which established him as one of the most important American photographic artists of the 20th century. Another, comparative show in 2000 placed him in the context of ‘the modern art of descriptive photography’ (Peter Galassi) on both sides of the Atlantic.

— Constance B. Schulz

Bibliography

• Szarkowski, J., Walker Evans (1971).
• Thompson, J. L., Walker Evans at Work (1982).
• Galassi, P., Walker Evans & Company (2000)

Walker Evans
Walker Evans in 1937
Born	November 3, 1903(1903-11-03) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.
Died	April 10, 1975 (aged 71) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.

For the off-road and NASCAR driver, see Walker Evans (racer).

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent"^[1]. 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^[2].

Contents 1 Biography 2 See also 3 Footnotes 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Biography

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans came from a well off family. He graduated from Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College, spending much of his time in the school's library, before dropping out. After spending a year in Paris, he returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends.

Evans took up photography in 1928^[1]. In 1933, he photographed in Cuba on assignment for the publisher of Carleton Beals' then-forthcoming book, The Crime of Cuba, photographing the revolt against the dictator Gerardo Machado. In Cuba, Evans briefly knew Ernest Hemingway.

Evans' photo of Allie Mae Burroughs, a symbol of the Great Depression

In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern states.

In the summer of 1936, while still working for the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Noting a similarity to the Beals' book, the critic Janet Malcolm, in her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, has pointed out the contradiction between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' 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 on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents," although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information. Evan's photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-Era misery and poverty. In September 2005, Fortune revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th anniversary issue^[3]. Charles Burroughs, who was four years old when Evans and Agee visited the family, was "still angry" at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; the son of Floyd Burroughs was also reportedly angry because the family was "cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant"^[3].

Evans continued to work 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 this museum devoted to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had befriended in his early days in New York.

In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These would be collected in book form in 1966 under the title Many are Called. In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt.

Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He only very loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure.

Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at Fortune magazine through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art (formerly the Yale School of Art and Architecture).

In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art staged a further exhibition of his work entitled simply Walker Evans.

Evans died at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975. ^[4]

In 1994, The Estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City's The Metropolitan Museum of Art.^[5] The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of approximately 1,000 negatives in collection of the Library of Congress which were produced for the Resettlement Administration (RA) / Farm Security Administration (FSA). Evan's RA / FSA works are in the public domain.^[6]

In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.^[7]

See also

• Photojournalism

Footnotes

1. ^ ^{a b} Metropolitan Museum of Art. More about Walker Evans. Retrieved September 13, 2008.
2. ^ Walker Evans, by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Maria Morris Hambourg, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman (Princeton University Press, 2000) ISBN 0691050783, ISBN 978-0691050782
3. ^ ^{a b} Whitford, David. The Most Famous Story We Never Told. Fortune, September 19, 2005.
4. ^ Walker Evans: Photographer of America By Thomas Nau Edition: illustrated Published by Macmillan, 2007, p. 59
5. ^ Wired Magazine. "Is It Art, or Memorex?" by Reena Jana. March 21, 2001.
6. ^ Masters of Photography website: Walker Evans page
7. ^ St. Louis Walk of Fame website: Walker Evans page

References

• "Furniture Store Sign, Birmingham, Alabama"
• Walker Evans Entry on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
• Walker Evans exhibition in the argus fotokunst art gallery in Berlin.
• Walker Evans or is It? Digital Reproductions

Further reading

• Rathbone, Belinda (2002). Walker Evans: A Biography. Thomas Allen & Son Ltd.. ISBN 0-618-05672-6. 
• Storey, Isabelle (2007). Walker's Way: My Years With Walker Evans. powerHouse Books. ISBN 978-1-57687-362-5. 
• Hambourg, Maria Morris; Jeff Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman (2000). Walker Evans. Princeton University Press / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 0-691-11965-1. 
• Rosenheim, Jeff; Douglas Eklund. Alexis Scwarzenbach. ed. Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology. Maria Morris Hambourg. Scalo / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 3-908247-21-7. 
• Leicht, Michael (2006). Wie Katie Tingle sich weigerte, ordentlich zu posieren und Walker Evans darüber nicht grollte. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld. ISBN 3-89942-436-0. 
• Worswick, Clark; Belinda Rathbone (2000). Walker Evans: The Lost Work. Arena Editions. ISBN 1-892041-29-4. 

External links

• Biography of the artist Walker Evans from the J. Paul Getty Museum
• Tod Papageorge on Walker Evans and Robert Frank
• Walker Evans catalogue in artnet's Artist Works Catalogues

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