Walker Evans

(American, 1903–1975)

Walker Evans was a renowned American photographer known for his black-and-white images documenting the impact of the Great Depression. As an artist, Evans disliked the formal photography like that of Alfred Stieglitz. Instead, he aimed to capture the quotidian beauty and diaristic events of daily life. “I used to try to figure out precisely what I was seeing all the time, until I discovered I didn’t need to,” he once explained. “If the thing is there, why, there it is.” Born on November 3, 1903 in St. Louis, MO, he went on to attend Williams College in Massachusetts before relocating to New York to pursue a career in writing. By 1929, he had switched from writing to the medium of photography. President Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Farm Security Administration commissioned Evans, along with a number of other photographers, to travel the country to capture how the Great Depression was affecting communities. After leaving the FSA, Evans worked with author James Agee to create the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an examination of three sharecropping families in Alabama. He later held a teaching position at the Yale School of Art and was an influence to a generation of photographers, including Diane Arbus, Lee Freidlander, and Robert Frank. Evans died on April 10, 1975 in New Haven, CT. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, among others.