Walker Evans | |
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 Evans in 1937 | |
| Born | (1903-11-03)November 3, 1903 St. Louis, Missouri, U.S. |
| Died | April 10, 1975(1975-04-10) (aged 71) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. |
| Notable work | American Photographs (1938) Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) Many Are Called (1966) |
Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an Americanphotographer andphotojournalist best known for his work for theResettlement Administration and theFarm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of theGreat Depression. Much of Evans'New Deal work uses thelarge format, 8 × 10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".[1]
Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as theMetropolitan Museum of Art or theGeorge Eastman Museum.[2]
Walker Evans was born inSt. Louis,Missouri to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker Evans.[3] His father was an advertising director. Walker was raised in an affluent environment; he spent his youth inToledo, Ohio,Chicago, andNew York City. He attended theLoomis Institute andMercersburg Academy,[4] then graduated fromPhillips Academy inAndover, Massachusetts in 1922. He studied French literature for a year atWilliams College, spending much of his time in the school's library before dropping out. He returned to New York City and worked as a night attendant in the map room of the Public Library.[5] After spending a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to the United States to join a literary and art crowd in New York City.John Cheever,Hart Crane, andLincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm on Wall Street from 1927 to 1929.[6]
Evans took up photography in 1928[1] around the time he was living inOssining, New York.[7] His influences includedEugène Atget andAugust Sander.[8] In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry bookThe Bridge by Hart Crane. In 1931, he made a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston vicinity sponsored by Lincoln Kirstein.
In May and June 1933, Evans took photographs inCuba on assignment forLippincott, the publisher ofCarleton Beals'The Crime of Cuba (1933), a "strident account" of the dictatorship ofGerardo Machado. There, Evans drank nightly withErnest Hemingway, who lent him money to extend his two-week stay an additional week. His photographs documented street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes. He also helped Hemingway acquire photos from newspaper archives that documented some of the political violence Hemingway described inTo Have and Have Not (1937). Fearing that his photographs might be deemed critical of the government and confiscated by Cuban authorities, he left 46 prints with Hemingway. He had no difficulties when returning to the United States, and 31 of his photos appeared in Beals' book. The cache of prints left with Hemingway was discovered inHavana in 2002 and exhibited at an exhibition inKey West.[9][10]
TheGreat Depression years of 1935–36 were a period of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In 1935, Evans spent two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign inWest Virginia andPennsylvania. In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an "information specialist" in theResettlement Administration (later called theFarm Security Administration), a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture.[11] From October 1935 on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in theSouthern United States. In November 1935, he visited the industrial hub of theLehigh Valley in easternPennsylvania, capturing photos ofBethlehem Steel. His photograph,Bethlehem Graveyard and Steel Mill, which capturedBethlehem's St. Michael's Cemetery in the foreground and Bethlehem Steel's smokestacks in the background ranks among his best known.[12]
In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, writerJames Agee and he were sent byFortune on assignment toHale County, Alabama for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three White tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking bookLet Us Now Praise Famous Men.[13] Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. CriticJanet Malcolm notes that a contradiction existed between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs ofsharecroppers.[14]
In 1936, Walker Evans, employed by theNational Recovery Administration photographed three impoverished sharecropper families inHale County, Alabama. The photographs became iconic and were praised for effectively capturing the negative effects of theGreat Depression in theAmerican South. The photographs are displayed at theMetropolitan Museum of Art,[15][16] theWhitney Museum[17] and theNational Galleries of Scotland[18] among other places.
The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town ofAkron, Alabama, and the owners of the land on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents", although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information. Evans' photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-era misery and poverty. In September 2005,Fortune revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th-anniversary issue.[19] Charles Burroughs, who was four years old when Evans and Agee visited the family, was "still angry" at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; the son of Floyd Burroughs was also reportedly angry because the family was "cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant".[19]
Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, an exhibition,Walker Evans: American Photographs, was held atthe Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was the first exhibition in the museum devoted to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, who Evans befriended in his early days in New York.
In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in theNew York City Subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These were collected in book form in 1966 under the titleMany Are Called. These photos figure in the novel "Rules of Civility" by Amor Towles. In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentoredHelen Levitt.
Like such other photographers asHenri Cartier-Bresson, Evans rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his ownnegatives. He loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure.
Between 1940 and 1959, Walker Evans was awarded threeGuggenheim Fellowships in Photography to continue his work of making record photographs of contemporary American subjects.[20]
Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer atTime.[21] Shortly afterward, he became an editor atFortune through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for graphic design at the Yale University School of Art.
In one of his last photographic projects, Evans completed a black-and-white portfolio ofBrown Brothers Harriman & Co.'s offices and partners for publication in "Partners in Banking", published in 1968 to celebrate the private bank's 150th anniversary.[22] In 1973 and 1974, Evans used the newPolaroid SX-70instant camera for his last work; the company provided him with an unlimited supply of film, and the camera's simplicity and speed were easier for the aged photographer.[23]
The first definitive retrospective of his photographs, which "individually evoke an incontrovertible sense of specific places, and collectively a sense of America", according to a press release, was on view at New York'sMuseum of Modern Art (MOMA) in early 1971. Selected byJohn Szarkowski, the exhibit was titled simplyWalker Evans.[24]
Evans's style has been hard to describe. John Szarkowski regarded his work as different, and MOMA considers him "one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century."[25] In a 1964 lecture at Yale University, Evans described his own style as "Lyric Documentary."[26] Others, such as Jane Tormey, have described his later work as having a "vernacular" style, a common aesthetic made popular by Geoffrey Batchen in his seminal article "Vernacular Photographies."[27]
| External videos | |
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 Walker Evans in His Own Words onYouTube, (4:37),J. Paul Getty Museum |
Evans died at his apartment in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975.[28] The last person Evans talked to wasHank O'Neal. In reference to the newly createdA Vision Shared project, O'Neal recounts, "The picture on the back ofthe book, of him taking a picture – he actually called me up and told me he had found it”. “And then the next morning I got up and I had a phone call fromLeslie Katz, who ran theEakins Press. And Leslie said: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Walker Evans?’ And I said: ‘What are you talking about?’ He said: ‘He died last night.’ I said: ‘Cut it out. I talked to him last night twice’ ... So an hour and a half after we had our conversation, he died. He had a stroke and died."[29]
In 1994, the estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.[30] The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of about 1,000 negatives in collection of theLibrary of Congress, which were produced for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration; these works are in the public domain.[31]
In 2000, Evans was inducted into theSt. Louis Walk of Fame.[32][33]
The problem with Agee's book: the pictures and the text don't agree. The text is a howl of anger and anguish over the misery of the sharecroppers' lives...'Don't listen to him,' the serene, orderly Walker Evans photographs seem to say.
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