Walker Evans

WALKER EVANS (U.S.A., 1903-1975)
"Mississippi."
Photograph.
Signed on the reverse.
With stamp on the back: "Reproduced from the collection of the Library of Congress".
Measurements: 28 x 35,5 cm.

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist, mainly known by his realistic and human images of the daily rural life during the Great Depression of 1930; his photos of sharecroppers in Alabama, like those of Dorothea Lange, are considered icons of the modern world. Evans found beauty in banal, everyday objects, seeking to produce intelligent, authoritative and transcendent photographs.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, into a middle-class family, he spent his youth in various cities in the eastern United States. After graduating in literature from Phillips Academy, he studied French literature for a year at Williams College between 1922 and 1923, always maintaining a keen interest in literature, as his first ambition was to be a writer. For a time, he worked as a night assistant in the map room of the city's public library, before traveling to Paris in 1926 to study at La Sorbonne, with the intention of becoming a writer. In 1928, living in Ossining, New York, he became interested in photography as a poetry-like means of capturing everyday reality, inspired by photographers such as Eugène Atget and August Sander. He worked as a clerk in a brokerage firm on Wall Street from 1927 to 1929 and lived with a group of artists and writers in New York, including the novelist John Cheever and the poet Hart Crane, with whom he published three of his photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge in the poetry book The Bridge in 1930. A year later, another friend, Lincoln Kirstein, commissioned a series of photographs of Victorian houses in Boston.

In 1933, Evans spent two months in Cuba photographing to illustrate The Crime of Cuba, a book by journalist Carleton Beals that denounced the situation on the island under Gerardo Machado y Morales. During his stay he documented street life and poverty, and even met every night with Ernest Hemingway, to whom he lent money to extend his trip and with whom he left 46 photographs for fear of confiscation by Cuban authorities, which were discovered and exhibited until 2002. Back in the United States, Beals' book was published with 31 of his photographs.

During the Great Depression, in 1935, Evans began working for government agencies, starting with the Resettlement Administration (RA) and continuing with its successor, the Farm Security Administration (FSA), to combat rural poverty. In the summer of 1936, he was assigned a project for Fortune magazine with writer James Agee in Hale County, Alabama; although the magazine did not publish it, the influential book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, featuring Evans' photographs and Agee's writing, was published in 1941, poignantly portraying the poverty of three white sharecropper families. Evans' photographs made these families icons of Depression poverty, although decades later some descendants expressed annoyance at not having received a copy of the book and at the image of ignorance and resignation they felt it conveyed. Evans continued at the FSA until 1938, when MoMA presented Walker Evans: American Photographs, the first monographic exhibition of architectural photographs and the first devoted to the work of a single photographer at the museum. That same year he took his first photographs in the New York subway with a hidden camera, published in 1966 in his book Many are Called, and was mentored by photographer Helen Levitt. In 1940 he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.