Background
Walker Evans was born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. His father was an advertising director. He was raised in an affluent environment, he spent his youth in Toledo, Chicago, and New York City.
(Between 1936 and 1941 Walker Evans and James Agee collabo...)
Between 1936 and 1941 Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on one of the most provocative books in American literature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). While at work on this book, the two also conceived another less well-known but equally important book project entitled Many Are Called. This three-year photographic study of subway passengers made with a hidden camera was first published in 1966, with an introduction written by Agee in 1940.
https://www.amazon.com/Many-Are-Called-Walker-Evans/dp/0300106173/?tag=2022091-20
2004
(A landmark work of American photojournalism. In the summe...)
A landmark work of American photojournalism. In the summer of 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans set out on assignment for Fortune magazine to explore the daily lives of sharecroppers in the South. Their journey would prove an extraordinary collaboration and a watershed literary event when, in 1941, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was first published to enormous critical acclaim. This unsparing record of place, of the people who shaped the land and the rhythm of their lives, is intensely moving and unrelentingly honest, and today it stands as a poetic tract of its time.
https://www.amazon.com/Let-Now-Praise-Famous-Men/dp/0618127496/?tag=2022091-20
(A refreshing look at Walker Evans' photography during his...)
A refreshing look at Walker Evans' photography during his years at the Resettlement Administration/Farm Security Administration (1935-1938). Over one hundred photographs from the Library of Congress archives, including famous and little known shots, show Evans' skill as well as his workflow and shot selection process. Background information is provided for several photographs, including locations, detailed descriptions of subjects and social context.
https://www.amazon.com/Walker-Evans-Security-Administration-Photographs/dp/1481853937/?tag=2022091-20
Walker Evans was born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, United States. His father was an advertising director. He was raised in an affluent environment, he spent his youth in Toledo, Chicago, and New York City.
Walker Evans attended The Loomis Institute and Mercersburg Academy before graduating from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1922. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College, spending much of his time in the school's library, before dropping out. He returned to New York and worked as a night attendant in the map room of the Public Library.
After spending a year in Paris in 1926, Walker Evans returned to the United States to join a literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm in Wall street from 1927 to 1929.
Walker Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The 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, Walker Evans took photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals' The Crime of Cuba (1933), a "strident account" of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. There Evans drank nightly with Ernest Hemingway, who loaned 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 in To 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 in Havana in 2002 and exhibited at an exhibition in Key West.
Walker Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at Fortune magazine 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 of Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.'s offices and partners for publication in "Partners in Banking," published in 1968 to celebrate the private bank's 150th anniversary. In 1973 and 1974, Walker Evans also shot a long series with the then-new Polaroid SX-70 camera, after age and poor health had made it difficult for him to work with elaborate equipment.
(Between 1936 and 1941 Walker Evans and James Agee collabo...)
2004(A refreshing look at Walker Evans' photography during his...)
(A landmark work of American photojournalism. In the summe...)
Quotes from others about the person
Jerry Tallmer of the New York Post described him as: "the man who used essential sparseness and flat reportage to create an altogether new photography."