on the plight of the Southern tenant farmer and was
assigned a staff photographer. He insisted thatFor-
tuneget him Evans, and the publishers negotiated a
deal wherein Evans would be able to leave the RA,
but his photographs would still be in the public
domain. There may not have been a more unlikely
partnership: Agee was a romantic, obsessed with the
superficiality of documenting lives plainly with him-
self in-frame; Evans was clinically out-of-frame, an
anonymous, bodiless eye, recording and observing.
The resulting ‘‘article’’ was both too long and too
confusing to be anythingFortunecould publish, and
eventually, Agee and Evans published it as a photo-
text (along the lines of Caldwell and Bourke-White’s
You Have Seen Their Faces).
WhenLet Us Now Praise Famous Menwas pub-
lished in 1941, Walker Evans’s 31 photographs were
the preliminary ‘‘book’’ to Agee’s. The photographs
and words were co-equal representations and com-
mentary on the lives of the farmers they lived with.
The book was revolutionary, a massive indictment
against documentary efforts to represent any life
absolutely, and also a re-appropriation of the genre
of photo-text itself. But America’s period of intense
introspection was passing, and Evans and Agee’s
angry book garnered little comment; it would not
be until nearly 20 years later thatLet Us Now Praise
Famous Menwould receive the proper attention it
deserved. What makes Evans’s photographs in
Famous Menso powerful is their unflinching and
clinical attachment to detail and subject. When
pictures were framed wrong or focused incorrectly,
Evans simply cut out the negatives, physically
cropping and editing his pictures to a more faith-
ful representation of what he observed and wished
to convey.
Unlike many of the photographers working for
the RA, Evans’s pictures were lucid, candid; the
opposite of the propaganda he was hired to produce.
Though the RA was peppered with stellar photogra-
phers, some of whom would go on to have important
careers, Evans’s pictures are the most well-known
and the most memorable. They quickly became
icons of the period he was documenting and have
remained epitomes of both 1930s’ photography as
well as of the powerfully influential notion that the
photographer can be both vitally engaged yet re-
moved and anonymous that results in a sort of tran-
scendence of both subject matter and maker.
His style of anonymity allowed Evans the oppor-
tunity to photograph truly anonymous subjects, to
observe and reproduce clear images without the
burden of heavy commentary and superficial drama
that he felt distracted the viewer from the actual
topic. This is best demonstrated in Evans’s next
project after being released from the RA, a portrait
series of New York City subway riders. Evans con-
cealed his camera under his coat to snap these
pictures in an extreme example of his desire for
anonymity, where Evans acted virtually as a voyeur
to attempt more realistic, unrehearsed pictures.
Indeed, these photographs have a random, detached
quality, creating a connection between anonymous
photographer and subject.
The simplicity of Evans’s subjects and style belies
a very complex and focused eye; he attempted to
translate what he knew about literature, modern
art, and popular culture into a visual reflection. If
one is amazed by the clearness of Evans’s eye, it
must also be considered that such clarity only dee-
pens the difficulty of interpretation. Above all else,
Walker Evans did not want his photographs to tell
stories, follow moods, and create drama: they resist
simple assimilation and understanding. Recently,
Evans’s pictures of signs and advertisements have
come into critical scrutiny, and through them, one
can glean not only the documentation of America
and its popular culture, but also a real and palpable
borrowing of such modern art techniques as col-
lage, found art, andtrompe l’oeil.His vision and
style, crystal clear, uncompromising, makes his
photographs some of the most recognizable in the
history of American twentieth century photogra-
phy, and the arbiter and documenter of a peculiarly
introspective American decade, the 1930s.
ANDYCrank
Seealso:Bourke-White, Margaret; Documentary
Photography; Farm Security Administration; His-
tory of Photography: Interwar Years; Museum of
Modern Art; Photography in the United States:
South; Propaganda; Representation and GenderBiography
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, 3 November 1903. Attends
Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, graduat-
ing 1922, and Williams College, Williamstown, Massa-
chusetts for a year. First photographs appear in Hart
Crane’sThe Bridge, 1930; Begins documentation of nine-
teenth century Victorian houses, 1930; Havana pictures
published in Carlton Beals’sThe Crime of Cuba, 1933;
becomes staff photographer atFortunemagazine, 1934;
appointed to photograph rural America with the Reset-
tlement Administration (Farm Security Administration),
1935; photographs antebellum architecture; collaborates
with author James Agee in Alabama for eventual book,
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1936; John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, 1940; becomes
critic-reviewer forTimemagazine, 1943–1945; promoted
to Special Photographic Editor atFortune, 1948–1965;
Elected Member of Century Association, 1954; Second
Guggenheim Fellowship, 1959; Professor at Yale Uni-EVANS, WALKER