Chicago, 1947
Walker Evans was an important contributor to the development of American documentary photography in the 1930s. His precisely detailed, frontal depictions of people and artifacts of American life (crammed store interiors, display windows, billboards, etc.) have influenced each succeeding generation of photographers.
Abandoning his early ambitions to write and paint, Evans turned to photography and arrived at a dry, economical, unpretentious style which attempted to lay bare before the viewer the most literal facts. He was critical from the start of what he termed the "artsicraftsiness" of art photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz and the "commercialism" of those such as Edward Steichen.
Although primarily a photographer of environments rather than people, Evans's social concerns brought him face to face with the victims of the Depression. He tried to capture their stoicism in unflinchingly direct portraits. He believed with Baudelaire that the artist's task was to face head-on the harshest realities and to report them to the larger world. He said: "The real thing that I'm talking about has purity and a certain severity, rigor, or simplicity, directness, clarity, and it is without artistic pretension in a self-conscious sense of the word."
Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and was raised in Kenilworth, Illinois. He attended the Loomis School, Phillips Academy, and Williams College. After a short time working at the New York Public Library, he traveled to Paris, where he audited courses at the Sorbonne and immersed himself in the writings of Flaubert and Baudelaire. He returned to New York in 1927 and began to photograph seriously the following year. His photographs were used to illustrate an edition of his friend Hart Crane's The Bridge in 1930. The same year, at the suggestion of Lincoln Kirstein, he began to document early Victorian houses in New England and New York. These photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. Kirstein and Evans collaborated on three books in the following years, and many early Evans images were published in Kirstein's journal Hound & Horn.
Evans's first exhibition was held at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932. That same year he provided illustrations for Carleton Beals's book The Crime of Cuba. In 1935 Evans made photographs of African art exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art for distribution to colleges and libraries by the General Education Board. Evans was hired by Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration at this time. He took part in the FSA's photographic survey of rural America at various times during the next four years, reporting primarily on southern states. At the same time he photographed pre-Civil War architecture for his own interests.
In the summer of 1936 Evans took a leave of absence from the FSA in order to work on a Fortune magazine project with the writer James Agee. The team lived with Alabama sharecropper families for two months. Their work was rejected by Fortune but was published as a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in 1941. The photographs Evans took for the FSA and this volume represents some of his most important and influential work.
In 1938 Evans began to take candid shots of subway riders and people in the streets. In this work he relinquished control of framing and lighting in order to achieve the purest record of the moment. From 1943 to 1945 he was a staff writer for Time. He became a staff writer and the sole staff photographer at Fortune in 1945. He worked at Fortune for the next 20 years in these roles and as an independent associate editor. Fortune published many of Evans's photo-essays with his own texts. He was Professor of Graphic Design at Yale University from 1965 until his death in New Haven 10 years later.
During his lifetime Evans was the recipient of many awards. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1940 and received an honorary degree from Williams College in 1968. His photographs were exhibited all over the world, including several major shows at the Museum of Modern Art.
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