Walker Evans

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 8x10in view camera, which when used directly in front of a subject can create the appearance of a dispassionate viewpoint. Evans and other FSA photographers used this technique, and others, to emphasize the plight of America's poor and workers during the Great Depression. In some ways, Evans is perhaps the first and greatest photographer of the American social landscape.

Biography

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans was part of a well-to-do family. He graduated from Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass. He studied Literature for a year at Williams College 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 and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. As a group, they held American commercialism in great disdain.

Intimidated by the difficulty of writing great prose, Evans turned to photography in 1930. In 1933, he photographed in Cuba during the revolt against the dictator Geraldo Machado. Evans went there on assignment for the publisher of Carleton Beals' forthcoming book, The Crime of Cuba. The photographs Evans created there do not illustrate Beals' florid tales of political intrigue and violence. Instead, they possess a kind of clarity and serenity, all under the guise of documentary objectivity [1]. In Cuba, Evans briefly knew Ernest Hemingway and may have influenced his work.

 
In 1935, he spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) to 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.

Evans was a passionate reader and writer and – from his later years as a staff writer (1945) at Time Magazine and then editor (1945-65) at Fortune magazine – a skilled prose stylist. He wrote that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent." Evans' devotion to clarity and beautiful form, whether in pictures or in prose, made him a vigorous editor of his own work, and perhaps caused him to hold in contempt those photographers and writers who would not do the same.

In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt. In 1941, Evans co-published, along with James Agee, the ground-breaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. It was a series of photos by Evans along with accompanying text by Agee, detailing the duo's journey through the rural South during the Great Depression. 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 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 familes headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs and Frank Tingle, lived in Hale County, Alabama, near the small town of Akron. The families were sharecroppers, which, in essence, meant they were virtual slaves to wealthy landowners in the area.

These landowners told the three families that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents," although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, recalled discounting that information during interviews conducted later in her life.

Evan's photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-Era misery and poverty. Today, in Hale County, Alabama, Evans, Agee and their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men remain controversial -- with many of the subjects' descendants maintaining the family was presented in a falely unflattering light by Evans's photographs.

Evans and Agee were originally sent to Hale County on assignment by Fortune magazine, which subsequently opted not to run the story. In September, 2005, Fortune revisted Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th anniversary issue: [2]

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.

It has been suggested that Evans provided the inspiration behind Andy Warhol's photo booth portraits, following the publication of 'Subway Portraits' in Harper's Bazaar in March 1962. Evans first experimented with the photo booth self portraits in New York in 1929, using it to detach his own artistic presence from his imagery, craving after the true objectivity of what he later described as the "ultimate purity" of the "record method."

In addition to his strong documentary work, Evans developed an abstract modernist style, using the tools of both black-and-white and colour photography to cover both socio-political issues and more conceptual artistic ideas.

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.

In 1965, Evans became 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 in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1975. In 2000, he was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame.