WALKER EVANS
American
Walker Evans’s photographs helped define, docu-
ment, (and sometimes invent) both the cultural and
physical landscape of America in the twentieth cen-
tury. More than any other photographer before
him, Evans relished the anonymity of his camera
and its reflective, detached quality, and his subjects,
from tenant farmers in Alabama to domestic exter-
iors throughout America, are simply allowed to
exist as themselves, never sentimentalized or cele-
brated. Walker Evans was as exacting and meticu-
lous as the images he documented, calling his
photographs ‘‘reflective rather than tendentious
and, in a certain way, disinterested’’ (Hill 1982,
151). Though he worked independently for maga-
zines such asTimeandFortune, Evans is probably
best known for his collaboration with fellow jour-
nalist (and poet/novelist) James Agee in a sprawling
documentary of tenant farmers in Alabama,Let Us
Now Praise Famous Men. Originally ignored in its
initial publication in 1941,Famous Menwas re-dis-
covered in the early 1960s, and heralded as a master-
piece by many critics, and Evans’s reputation as a
documentary photographer enjoyed a rebirth and
re-evaluation that continues to this day.
Though born in St. Louis in 1903, Evans spent
much of his boyhood in Toledo, Ohio, Chicago,
and New York City because of his father’s reloca-
tions as an advertising director. Evans’s family was
fairly affluent, sending young Walker off to Phillips
Academy in Andover, Massachusetts. After his gra-
duation in 1922, he enrolled in Williams College,
Williamstown, Massachusetts, and began studying
literature. His love of writing and literature even-
tually sent him to Paris, where he studied briefly at
the Sorbonne, hoping to become a writer himself.
It wasn’t until around 1928 that Evans first
began to experiment with photography, taking a
few shots with a basic, handheld camera and shar-
ing them with his friends. But it was his love of
literature (especially European modernists like
Pound, Joyce, and T.S. Eliot) that inspired Evans’s
early photographs and theories about art. His first
published photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge (for
Hart Crane’s epic poemThe Bridge)weremere
shapes, close-ups of the latticework and structure in
heavy definition, like the disjointed, cubist canvases
of Pablo Picasso.
Around this time, Evans became interested in
documentary photography, spending his days on
the streets of New York snapping pictures of its
architecture and people. His own style began to
emerge as a mixture of realism and objectivism,
where the subjects or the images became the central
focus of the work, non-dramatic, non-posed, and
the author’s presence was minimized. His friend-
ship with Lincoln Kirstein, the son of a wealthy
Boston socialite, allowed him the opportunity to
create his first series of domestic exteriors of Vic-
torian houses throughout New England, which
would later become his first solo exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1933, and two years
earlier, his first group exhibition at the John Becker
Gallery in New York put him in the company of
up-and-coming photographers Ralph Steiner and
Margaret Bourke-White.
Evans’s trip to Havana (to provide pictures for
Carleton Beals’s book) brought the first of Evans’s
documentary photographs that would later define
his style. Evans’s photographs inThe Crime of Cuba
were studies of the people of Havana, of the poor
families living on the streets, or the ubiquitous beg-
gars fanning out across the town. But Evans
stopped short of making any political statement
with his camera, observing the ironies of Cuban
life remotely. Unlike other documentary photogra-
phers, Evans hungered after the non-posed, non-
dramatic, simple subjects. His photographs were
observant, anonymous, and sequential studies that
fit together rather than individual images that stood
on their own, and the Cuba series, published in 1933
gave Evans the exposure that propelled him into his
next two jobs, as a staff photographer atFortune
magazine, and, perhaps most importantly as a doc-
umentary photographer under Roy Stryker in the
Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Secur-
ity Administration [FSA]).
But Evans’s best-known photographs were most
likely taken during a break in his duties with the
Resettlement Administration (RA) during a brief
stay in Hale County, Alabama, with novelist and
friend James Agee. Agee had initially been commis-
sioned byFortunemagazine in 1936 to do an articleEVANS, WALKER