Walker Evans

Walker Evans, more than any other photographer in the thirties and forties, defined the documentary aesthetic. For over four decades he used his camera precisely and lucidly to record the American experience. He is generally acknowledged as America's finest documentary photographer of this century. He attempted to show both the beauty of his subjects and the horror of the social situations in which they lived. During the Depression, from 1935 to 1937, Evans took part in the most extensive photographic project ever carried out in the United States-the pictorial survey of the Farm Security Administration. The now-legendary collaboration with James Agee that resulted in the masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men documents his dedication to photographing the country he knew.Evans's talented eye and sensitive heart make him one of the great photographers of this century. This volume contains many of his best-known images.Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, Walker Evans studied at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1926-27. Mainly self-taught as a photographer, he worked freelance in New York starting in 1928. He was part of Roy Stryker's Farm Security Administration project as a staff photographer in the Southern United States from 1935 to 1937. From 1945 to 1965 he was an associate editor and photographer for Fortune magazine. After retiring from professional photography in 1965, he became a professor at Yale University, where he taught generations of young photographers in documentary approach. Evans received three Guggenheim Fellowships, as well as many other awards, and his work is included in museum collections around the world. He died in 1975 in New Haven, Connecticut.