EVANS, WALKER

Walker Evans (1903–1975) was one of the great photographers of the twentieth century, a pivotal figure in establishing the documentary arts movement in the United States, and among the signal artists responsible for fixing the exact look of the Depression for subsequent generations.

He was born Walker Evans III on November 3, 1903, in St. Louis, and moved to Kenilworth, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, in 1908, and to Toledo, Ohio, in 1915. A sensitive but indifferent student, Evans suffered his education in a series of mostly private boarding schools, including the Loomis Institute in Connecticut, Mercersbury Academy in Pennsylvania, and briefly, Philips Andover Academy in Massachusetts. Following a rejection from Yale University, he began and ended his university career with a single semester at Williams College in Massachusetts in December 1923.

After a number of clerical jobs in New York City and a renovative thirteen-month stay in Paris, Evans returned to New York City in 1927 and began the study and practice of the camera in earnest. For the next decade and a half, he engaged in a remarkable string of publications, exhibitions, and field trips that constitute not only the most fecund period of his creative life, but also one of the indelible landmarks in the history of American photography. Starting in 1931 and for the next several years, Evans conducted a photographic study of the vanishing Late-Victorian architecture, mostly in New England. In 1933, the Museum of Modern Art presented "Walker Evans: Photographs of 19th Century Homes," which according to biographer James R. Mellow was "the first one man photographic exhibition mounted by a major museum in the United States" (Mellow 1999, p. 624). In Havana, Cuba (1933), Evans documented the social terrain under the dictatorship of Gerado Machado in thirty-one illustrations for the radical journalist Carleton Beal's text The Crime of Cuba. Beginning in 1935 and for the next two years, Evans produced a sweeping catalog of the American scene in a series of field trips, mostly in the southern and central regions, as an information specialist for the photographic unit of the historical section of the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), a unit which ultimately produced some 270,000 photographs, including the work of photographers like Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Carl Mydans, and Arthur Rothstein. On loan to Fortune magazine in the summer of 1936, he made an excursion to Hale County, Alabama, with the writer James Agee; Evans's photographs and Agee's text would become the classic study of three tenant families, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In 1938, before embarking on a three-year project of subway portraits with a hidden camera (eventually published in 1966 as Many Are Called) he attained national prominence with the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition "Walker Evans: American Photographs," a summary statement of more than a decade's work, and his single most famous collection.

An Evans composition was the result of both a contrarian spirit and a deliberated aesthetic that planted itself in opposition to the dominant photographic trends in the first quarter of the century; specifically, the mystical aestheticism of Alfred Stieglitz, the commercial gloss and celebrity portraiture of Edward Steichen, the staged theatrics of Margaret Bourke-White, and even the machine-age formalism of Laszlo Mholy Nagy (of which precocious examples can be found in Evans's early experiments). Against these, his taste ran to the immediacy of raw fact, the unadorned directness of non- or even anti-art: newsreels, tabloid journalism, and the home snapshot. An Evans photo can disarm the casual eye in its avoidance of romance or prettification, frippery or melodrama, its freedom from overt forms of camera rhetoric and embellishment. Actually the restraint of the shot belies a fierce distillate of mental energy, an astringent appreciation of form, and a personal preference for the poetics of entropy and depletion, the harmonics of disarray and adventitions moments. Evans's characteristic subjects were torn posters and billboards cropped with a surrealist wit; shop fronts scrabbled with a patchwork of graffiti and rusty slogans; gas stations, junk yards, and railway depots; dusty vistas of replicated housing and stretch landscapes of smoking factory and clapboard shanty; aging Victorian homes, peeling Greek Revival buildings, and the chipped framewood of Black Baptist churches; and the faces and figures of the anonymous caught unguarded in the nick of an interior event. Evans's treatment of the forms of neglect and the scourings of time coincided almost exactly, whether by accident or design, with the look and fact of the ongoing social crisis of the Great Depression, and become its representative expression.

Starting in 1945, Evans spent twenty years as a full-time staff photographer for Fortune magazine, and another eight years (1964-1972) as professor of graphic design at the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Throughout the last phase of his career, he never stopped collecting penny postcards or roadside bric-a-brac, or working obsessively with a Polaroid color camera, with which he produced more than two thousand photographs before his death on April 10, 1975, in New Haven, Conneticut.

See Also: AGEE, JAMES; FARM SECURITY ADMINISTRATION; PHOTOGRAPHY; RESETTLEMENT ADMINISTRATION (RA).

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agee, James, and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. 1960.

Beals, Carlton. The Crime of Cuba. 1933.

Evans, Walker. American Photographs. 1938.

Evans, Walker. Many Are Called. 1966.

Evans, Walker. Walker Evans. 1971.

Hambourg, Maria Morris; Jeff L. Rosenheim; Douglas Elkund; and Mia Finemon. Walker Evans. 2000.

Mellow, James R. Walker Evans. 1999.

Rathbone, Belinda. Walker Evans: A Biography. 1995.

Alan Spiegel