Walker Evans Biography Quotes 3 Report mistakes

Early Life and Aspirations
Walker Evans was born in 1903 in the United States and grew up with an early passion for literature and the arts. As a young man he briefly attended college, then spent time in Paris in the 1920s, steeping himself in French literature and modernist ideas. He first imagined a literary career, reading deeply in Flaubert and Baudelaire, but returned to New York resolved to make pictures with the same rigorous clarity he admired in prose. By the late 1920s he had turned decisively to photography, teaching himself the craft and setting out to see the American vernacular with unsentimental precision.

Finding a Voice
Evans quickly developed a distinctive approach, favoring frontal compositions, large-format cameras, and an insistence on clarity that he would later describe as a "documentary style". He photographed storefronts, signage, main streets, wooden churches, graveyards, and weathered houses, subjects that many considered too ordinary to warrant attention. In New York he moved among writers and artists; he photographed the poet Hart Crane and was encouraged by supporters who recognized the quiet authority of his prints. Early advocates included Lincoln Kirstein, who understood the ambition behind Evans's apparently plain style and would later become one of his most important champions.

Havana and the Turn to Public Work
In 1933 Evans traveled to Cuba on assignment to illustrate Carleton Beals's exposé The Crime of Cuba. Working in the streets of Havana, he made unsparing pictures of poverty and political unrest that broadened his sense of what photography could do while sharpening his refusal to sentimentalize. The Havana work helped position him for the public projects that followed during the Great Depression.

FSA Years and the Documentary Style
In 1935 Evans joined the Farm Security Administration under the direction of Roy Stryker. Alongside Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and other colleagues, he documented the frayed edges of American life: tenant farms, coal towns, roadside stands, and weather-beaten houses. Evans brought a meticulous, deadpan exactitude to these assignments, often using an 8x10 view camera to reveal textures of wood, fabric, and dust with uncompromising detail. He refused to pose or dramatize subjects, believing that exact description could be as eloquent as any rhetorical flourish. His FSA photographs from the South, especially those made in Alabama and Mississippi, became some of the most enduring images of the Depression.

Collaboration with James Agee
In the summer of 1936 Evans worked with writer James Agee on a Fortune magazine assignment about Southern tenant farmers. The magazine ultimately declined to publish the piece, but the collaboration deepened and matured into the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941. Agee's searching, impassioned text and Evans's austere, frontispiece-like portraits of families and their dwellings created a radical hybrid of literature and photography. The photographs of Allie Mae Burroughs and her family, made in Hale County, Alabama, exemplified his method: direct, frontal, stripped of overt commentary yet saturated with respect and gravity. The book's early reception was cool, but it later became canonical, a touchstone for the ethics and aesthetics of documentary work.

American Photographs and Museum Recognition
In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art presented a one-person exhibition of Evans's work, a landmark for photography in an art museum. The accompanying book, American Photographs, included an essay by Lincoln Kirstein and arranged Evan's images in a sequence that moved from architecture and signage to portraits and interiors and back out to the street. Alfred H. Barr, Jr., MoMA's founding director, supported the show, recognizing that Evans had articulated a rigorous American modernism rooted in the ordinary. The book's structure and tone were as influential as its individual pictures, suggesting how photographs could think and argue through juxtaposition and rhythm.

Magazines, The Subway, and The City
After the 1930s Evans continued to find new ways to interpret American life. He photographed the Brooklyn Bridge, New England architecture, and the layered signage of urban streets. His long association with Fortune magazine, beginning in the mid-1940s, allowed him to develop extended portfolios that treated industry, commerce, and the anonymous gesture of everyday people with the same seriousness he had brought to rural subjects. In New York he made an extraordinary body of subway portraits with a concealed camera, catching riders absorbed in their own thoughts. Published later as Many Are Called, with an introduction written years earlier by James Agee, the series dignified urban anonymity and showed Evans's ongoing interest in unposed human presence.

Teaching and Late Work
In the 1960s Evans began teaching at Yale, where he influenced a younger generation of photographers and critics by stressing clarity, sequence, and the ethics of looking. He remained engaged with the vernacular, collecting postcards and signs and turning increasingly to color in his final years. Late in life he embraced instant photography for its speed and candor, using it to continue his catalog of American textures, objects, and faces. Curator John Szarkowski at MoMA helped reintroduce Evans's work to new audiences, framing his achievement as a bedrock of modern photographic seeing.

Methods, Principles, and Relationships
Evans worked slowly, with a craftsman's discipline, often setting his tripod with deliberate care and waiting for light that clarified form without drama. He avoided captions that told viewers what to think, preferring spare titles that named place and date. He maintained cordial but independent relations with colleagues in federal and magazine projects, insisting that photographic integrity came before advocacy. With Roy Stryker he navigated the bureaucratic demands of a government archive; with James Agee he explored the limits of collaboration between text and image, each partner maintaining autonomy while building a shared moral argument. He respected peers like Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn, even as he pursued a cooler, more classical register. He admired earlier photographers such as Eugene Atget and, in turn, influenced artists ranging from Robert Frank and Diane Arbus to Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, and William Christenberry, the latter becoming a close ally who revisited Southern places Evans had first photographed.

Legacy
By the time he died in 1975, Evans had reshaped expectations of what photographs could do in art and public life. He demonstrated that the ordinary American scene, described with precision and humility, could carry the weight of history. His FSA images, his collaboration with James Agee, his MoMA exhibition American Photographs, his subway portraits, and his magazine portfolios together established a model of visual inquiry at once exacting and humane. Curators such as John Szarkowski continued to analyze and present his work, while writers and historians drew on his images to understand the century's social upheavals. Evans's influence persists wherever photographers attend closely to the built world, acknowledge the intelligence of their subjects, and trust that unembellished description can reveal, without rhetoric, an inner form of truth.

Our collection contains 3 quotes who is written by Walker, under the main topics: Art - Learning - Knowledge.

Other people realated to Walker: Henri Cartier-Bresson (Photographer), Gordon Parks (Photographer), Robert Frank (Photographer), Hart Crane (Poet)