Walker Evans
Walker Evans in 1937
Born	November 3, 1903(1903-11-03) St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.
Died	April 10, 1975 (aged 71) New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.

For the off-road and NASCAR driver, see Walker Evans (racer).

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He wrote that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent."^{[citation needed]} Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums, and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art^[1] Image File history File links Size of this preview: 800 × 533 pixelsFull resolution‎ (5,655 × 3,770 pixels, file size: 2. ... is the 307th day of the year (308th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1903 (MCMIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display calendar) of the Gregorian calendar or a common year starting on Wednesday of the 13-day slower Julian calendar. ... Nickname: Location in the state of Missouri Coordinates: , Country State County Independent City Government  - Mayor Francis G. Slay (D) Area  - City  66. ... This article is about the U.S. state. ... For other uses of terms redirecting here, see US (disambiguation), USA (disambiguation), and United States (disambiguation) Motto In God We Trust(since 1956) (From Many, One; Latin, traditional) Anthem The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York City National language English (de facto)1 Demonym American... is the 100th day of the year (101st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... New Haven redirects here. ... Official language(s) English Capital Hartford Largest city Bridgeport[3] Largest metro area Hartford Metro Area[2] Area  Ranked 48th  - Total 5,543[4] sq mi (14,356 km²)  - Width 70 miles (113 km)  - Length 110 miles (177 km)  - % water 12. ... For other uses of terms redirecting here, see US (disambiguation), USA (disambiguation), and United States (disambiguation) Motto In God We Trust(since 1956) (From Many, One; Latin, traditional) Anthem The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York City National language English (de facto)1 Demonym American... Walker Evans (born December 3, 1938) is an Off-road Motorsports Hall of Famer . ... is the 307th day of the year (308th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1903 (MCMIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (link will display calendar) of the Gregorian calendar or a common year starting on Wednesday of the 13-day slower Julian calendar. ... is the 100th day of the year (101st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1975 (MCMLXXV) was a common year starting on Wednesday (link will display full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Photography [fÓ™tÉ‘grÓ™fi:],[foÊŠtÉ‘grÓ™fi:] is the process of recording pictures by means of capturing light on a light-sensitive medium, such as a film or electronic sensor. ... Photo of a sharecropper by Walker Evans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. ... For other uses, see The Great Depression (disambiguation). ... There is also the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), located in Manhattan. ...

Biography

Born in Saint Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans was part of a well-to-do family. He graduated from Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass. He studied literature for a year at Williams College before dropping out. After spending a year in Paris, he returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. Nickname: Gateway City, Gateway to the West, or Mound City Motto: Official website: http://stlouis. ... Phillips Academy (also known as Phillips Andover or simply P.A. or Andover) is a co-educational University preparatory school for boarding and day students in grades 9-12. ... Williams College is a private, liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts. ... This article is about the capital of France. ... New York, New York and NYC redirect here. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Harold Hart Crane (July 21, 1899 – April 27, 1932) was an American poet. ... Photograph of Lincoln Kirstein taken by George Platt Lynes. ...

Intimidated by the difficulty of writing great prose,^{[citation needed]} Evans turned to photography in 1930. In 1933, he photographed in Cuba on assignment for the publisher of Carleton Beals' then-forthcoming book, The Crime of Cuba, photographing the revolt against the dictator Gerardo Machado. In Cuba, Evans briefly knew Ernest Hemingway. Gerardo Machado, Time, 1933 Gerardo Machado (y Morales) (28 September 1871, Camajani – 29 March 1939, Miami Beach, Florida) was a Cuban general of Cuban War of Independence and the 5th president of Cuba. ... Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. ...

Evans' photo of Allie Mae Burroughs, a symbol of the Great Depression

In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern states. Image File history File links Size of this preview: 461 × 599 pixelsFull resolution‎ (2,590 × 3,367 pixels, file size: 2. ... Image File history File links Size of this preview: 461 × 599 pixelsFull resolution‎ (2,590 × 3,367 pixels, file size: 2. ... For other uses, see The Great Depression (disambiguation). ... This article needs to be wikified. ... Official language(s) English Capital Charleston Largest city Charleston Largest metro area Charleston metro area Area  Ranked 41st  - Total 24,244 sq mi (62,809 km²)  - Width 130 miles (210 km)  - Length 240 miles (385 km)  - % water 0. ... This article is about the U.S. State. ... Photo of a sharecropper by Walker Evans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. ...

In the summer of 1936, while still working for the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale 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 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Noting a similarity to the Beals' book, the critic Janet Malcolm, in her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, has pointed out the contradiction between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers. James Rufus Agee (November 27, 1909 – May 16, 1955) was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist, screenwriter, journalist, poet, and film critic. ... Fortune magazine is Americas second longest-running business magazine after Forbes magazine. ... Hale County is a county of the State of Alabama. ... Floyd Burroughs on the cover of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans first published in 1941 in the United States. ... Janet Malcolm Janet Malcolm (born 1934) is an American writer and journalist on the staff of The New Yorker magazine. ... Sharecropping is a system of farming in which employee farmers work a parcel of land in return for a fraction of the parcels crops. ...

The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, 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. Evan's photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-Era misery and poverty. Many years later, some of the subjects' descendants maintained^{[citation needed]} that the family was presented in a falsely unflattering light by Evans' photographs. In September 2005, Fortune revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th anniversary issue.^[2] Akron is a town in Hale County, Alabama, United States. ...

Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, an exhibition, Walker Evans: American Photographs, was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was the first exhibition in this museum devoted to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had befriended in his early days in New York. Photo of a sharecropper by Walker Evans for the U.S. Resettlement Administration Initially created as the Resettlement Administration in 1935 as part of the New Deal, the Farm Security Administration was an effort during the Depression to combat rural poverty. ... Year 1938 (MCMXXXVIII) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... General Electric GE90-115B fanblade, on display at MOMA. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan in New York City. ... Photograph of Lincoln Kirstein taken by George Platt Lynes. ...

In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These would be collected in book form in 1966 under the title Many are Called. In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt. Year 1966 (MCMLXVI) was a common year starting on Saturday (link will display full calendar) of the 1966 Gregorian calendar. ... Helen Levitt (born 31 August 1913) is an American documentary photographer. ...

It has been suggested^{[citation needed]} that Evans provided the inspiration behind Andy Warhol's photo booth portraits, following the publication of 'Subway Portraits' in Harper's Bazaar in March 1962. Evans first experimented with photo-booth self-portraits in New York in 1929, using them to detach his own artistic presence from his imagery, craving for the true objectivity of what he later described as the "ultimate purity" of the "record method."^{[citation needed]} Andrew Warhola (August 6, 1928 — February 22, 1987), better known as Andy Warhol, was an American artist who was a central figure in the movement known as Pop art. ... Photo Booth is a small software application for taking photos with an iSight camera by Apple Inc. ... It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Harpers & Queen. ...

Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He only very 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. Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism, an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. ...

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 (formerly the Yale School of Art and Architecture). “TIME” redirects here. ... The Yale School of Art is one of twelve constituent schools of Yale University. ...

In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art staged a further exhibition of his work entitled simply Walker Evans.

Evans died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1975. In 2000, he was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. The St. ...

See also

• Photojournalism

Assault landing One of the first waves at Omaha Beach as photographed by Robert F. Sargent. ...

Footnotes

References

• Walker Evans Exhibition: "Carbon and Silver"
• "Furniture Store Sign, Birmingham, Alabama"
• Walker Evans Entry on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
• Walker Evans exhibition in the argus fotokunst art gallery in Berlin.
• Walker Evans or is It? Digital Reproductions

Further reading

• Rathbone, Belinda (2002). Walker Evans: A Biography. Thomas Allen & Son Ltd.. ISBN 0-618-05672-6. 
• Storey, Isabelle (2007). Walker's Way: My Years With Walker Evans. powerHouse Books. ISBN 978-1-57687-362-5. 
• Hambourg, Maria Morris; Jeff Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman (2000). Walker Evans. Princeton University Press / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 0-691-11965-1. 
• Rosenheim, Jeff; Douglas Eklund. in Alexis Scwarzenbach: Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology, Maria Morris Hambourg, Scalo / The Metropolitan Museum of Art. ISBN 3-908247-21-7. 
• Leicht, Michael (2006). Wie Katie Tingle sich weigerte, ordentlich zu posieren und Walker Evans darüber nicht grollte. transcript Verlag, Bielefeld. ISBN 3-89942-436-0. 

External links

• A biography of the artist Walker Evans from the J. Paul Getty Museum
• Tod Papageorge on Walker Evans and Robert Frank