Walker Evans was born on November 3, 1903, in St. Louis Missouri. Looking at the respectable status of his family, the time period, and his high level of education, it seems a surprise that Evans became a photographer. His decision to do so was, perhaps, a surprise even to himself. In his young adulthood, Evans resented both Americans' preoccupation with money as well as the fact that he had none of his own. Furthermore, he resented the smug self-satisfaction of a nation dedicated to business, and its seeming lack of interest in his own literary and artistic concerns. So, in 1928, at the age of 24, Walker Evans acquired a vest pocket camera. At the time, he had only a modest knowledge of and very limited respect for the camera's achievements. Appropriately then, he found himself drawn to a very particular kind of photography, one "so plain and common, so free of personal handwriting, that it seemed almost the antithesis of art: the kind of photography seen in newspapers and newsreels, on picture postcards, and in windows or real-estate dealers"; photography that spoke with a blunt and simple vocabulary.
In 1935, Evans shot a photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. He continued to do work for the RA and later the Farm Securities Administration (FSA), primarily in the southern states. His work for the FSA led him to co-publish a ground-breaking book in 1941 titled
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
This book contains a series of photographs by Evans combined with text by James Agee, detailing the two men's journey throughout the rural South during the Great Depression. It serves as a detailed account of three farming families, and paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Evans used a large-format 8 x 10-inch camera to capture the "fragility of the capitalist system." It is for his work for the FSA in documenting the effects of the Great Depression that Walker Evans is most famous.
In 1938, Evans discontinued his work for the FSA and in the same year, an exhibition was held at the Musuem of Modern Art in New York called, Walker Evans: American Photographs. This was the first exhibition in the museum to be devoted to the work of a single photographer. Evans' photographs were admired for the quiet, magisterial beauty they evoked, and for his ability to create visual irony while backing the irony with valid social points. Evans stated that his goal as a photographer was simply to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendant." It seems he did just that. And aside from being a successful photographer, Evans was also a passionate reader and writer. In 1945, he became a staff writer at
Time
magazine and shortly after, became editor at
Fortune
magazine, where he remained through 1965. That year, he became the professor of photography on faculty for the Graphic Design department at the Yale University School of Art. He died in his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 1975.
