Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, (1903) and came from an affluent family. His father was an advertising director. In 1926 Walker Evans dropped out of Williams College and arrived in Paris to launch his career as a writer. Though his life there revolved around the renowned Shakespeare and Company bookstore, a mixture of introversion and disdain for American culture kept him at a distance from the now famous expatriate circle of the era, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Murphy and the like. Evans said in an interview "The thing that kept me from knowing the Americans was that I was anti-American. I was not fleeing them but I disdained the moneyed, leisured, frivolous, superficial American who didn’t – well, like Scott Fitzgerald. I wouldn’t have paid any attention to him at all, however famous and successful a writer he was, because he wouldn’t speak French and had materialistic values. He was in love with the rich. I though this was terrible. I would have nothing to do with it."
Evans was a huge fan of James Joyce. He said about Joyce in an interview "He was my god. That, too, prevented me from writing. I wanted to write like that or not at all." Evans spent most of his time abroad alone and picked up his camera from time to time to document his immediate world, making images of his boarding room and his own shadow against a wall. When he returned to the States, Evans began to dedicate more time to his hobby, and by the end of his long career had established himself as one of the most important modernist photographers.
Evans was a huge fan of James Joyce. He said about Joyce in an interview "He was my god. That, too, prevented me from writing. I wanted to write like that or not at all." Evans spent most of his time abroad alone and picked up his camera from time to time to document his immediate world, making images of his boarding room and his own shadow against a wall. When he returned to the States, Evans began to dedicate more time to his hobby, and by the end of his long career had established himself as one of the most important modernist photographers.
After returning to the United States, he began to establish himself as a photographer with images of architecture and everyday life. In 1933, writer Lincoln Kirstein described Evans’s work as possessing a ‘tender cruelty’, referring to his combination of a clear, factual gaze with empathy for his subject matter. In 1935, Evans joined the Farm Security Administration to document the lives of the rural poor at the height of the Depression. With writer James Agee, he produced an extensive study of white tenant farmers in the Deep South, published as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
In 1943 Evans was hired by Time, Inc., and he spent the next 22 years with that publishing empire, most of them with the business magazine Fortune, with whom he developed a relationship as a photographer and writer that involved a comfortable salary and substantial independence. He continued to photograph architecture, especially rural churches, and he also began a series of revealing, spontaneous photographs of people taken in the New York City subways; the series was eventually published in book form as 'Many Are Called' in 1966. In 1965 he began teaching in the School of Art and Architecture of Yale University, and in the following year he retired from Time, Inc.
During the 1940 and '50s—the heyday of photojournalism in the magazines—Evans, with his prickly, superior intelligence and jealously guarded independence, was not a useful role model for most working photographers. Yet, as the promise of the magazines began to lose its lustre, Evans increasingly became a hero to younger photographers who were not comfortable as part of an editorial team. Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander are among the most significant later photographers who have acknowledged their debt to Evans. His influence on artists in fields other than photography has also been great.
(Via biography.com and MoMA )
In 1943 Evans was hired by Time, Inc., and he spent the next 22 years with that publishing empire, most of them with the business magazine Fortune, with whom he developed a relationship as a photographer and writer that involved a comfortable salary and substantial independence. He continued to photograph architecture, especially rural churches, and he also began a series of revealing, spontaneous photographs of people taken in the New York City subways; the series was eventually published in book form as 'Many Are Called' in 1966. In 1965 he began teaching in the School of Art and Architecture of Yale University, and in the following year he retired from Time, Inc.
During the 1940 and '50s—the heyday of photojournalism in the magazines—Evans, with his prickly, superior intelligence and jealously guarded independence, was not a useful role model for most working photographers. Yet, as the promise of the magazines began to lose its lustre, Evans increasingly became a hero to younger photographers who were not comfortable as part of an editorial team. Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus, and Lee Friedlander are among the most significant later photographers who have acknowledged their debt to Evans. His influence on artists in fields other than photography has also been great.
(Via biography.com and MoMA )
Self-portrait (1927)Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Walker Evans 1937
Evans's photo of Allie Mae Burroughs, a symbol of the Great Depression
"Whether he is an artist or not, the photographer is a joyous sensualist, for the simple reason that the eye traffics in feelings, not in thoughts. "~ Walker Evans
“my idea of what a portrait ought to be: anonymous and documentary and a straightforward picture of mankind.” Walker Evans
Food Line
Walker Evans In Cuba
In 1933, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to take photographs for The Crime of Cuba
"Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long." ~ Walker Evans
Walker Evans Little Known Polaroid SX-70's
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Check out an in-depth interview with Walker Evans here
