The Exacting Eye of Walker Evans

Woman and Man at Amusement Park, 1929. Gelatin silver print, 6 x 8.5 in

Walker Evans (1903-1975) created defining images of America. His work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. Evans took up photography upon his return to New York in 1927, following a year in Paris when his aspiration to become a writer faded in the shadow of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce. Best known for social documentary photography, Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration recording the effects of the Great Depression. Much of his work from this period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. Commenting on his work at the time, Evans noted that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that were literate, authoritative and transcendent.

Church of Nazarene, Tennessee, 1936, Gelatin Silver Print, 7.5 x 9.5 in

In 1936 he traveled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine and the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came out of this collaboration. Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, the Museum of Modern Art in New York held the exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs. This was the first exhibition that MoMA devoted to the work of a single photographer.

Throughout his career Evans contributed photographs to numerous publications, including three devoted solely to his work. In 1965 he left Fortune, where he had been a staff photographer for twenty years, to become a professor of photography and graphic design at Yale University. He remained in the position until 1974, a year before his death.