Walker Evans: Life, Work, and Documentary Photography Legacy

Introduction: Evans and the Art of Documentary Photography

The emergence of non-commercial still photography as an art form is comparatively recent and may probably be dated from the 1930s. Just as poets use the same language as journalists, lawyers, and curators, the ordinary realism of photography—including the medium of mug shots and real-estate advertisements—can become the material of visual poetry. In this context, the American photographer Walker Evans was among the first to identify this potential (Masters of Photography).

In the 1930s, Walker Evans's contribution to the development of American documentary photography was significant. Each succeeding generation of photographers was greatly influenced by his precise, comprehensive, and frontal portrayal of people and the artifacts of American life (Masters of Photography).

He abandoned his early ambitions of writing and painting and turned to photography, ultimately arriving at a dry, measured, and modest style that sought to lay bare the most literal facts before the viewer (Masters of Photography). From the beginning he was critical of what he called the "artsicraftsiness" of art photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, and equally critical of the "commercialism" of figures like Edward Steichen (Masters of Photography).

His earliest photography focused on environments rather than people, but his social concerns brought him into direct contact with the victims of the Depression, whom he tried to capture in daringly direct portraits that conveyed their stoicism. He believed, with Baudelaire, that an artist's job was to face head-on the cruelest realities and to describe them to the larger world. As he said:

"The real thing that I'm talking about has purity and a certain severity, rigor, or simplicity, directness, clarity, and it is without artistic pretension in a self-conscious sense of the word" (Masters of Photography).

Most of Evans's best work was done in the 1930s, and his pictures have been celebrated as documents of the Great Depression. However, his concerns extended far beyond the plight of that decade, and his creative pursuit of descriptive photography laid the foundations of a dynamic artistic tradition (Masters of Photography). His restless curiosity about American identity fundamentally broadened the engagement of advanced photography and modern art with the world outside the studio (Masters of Photography).

In the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his photographs are arranged in groups of eight, each concentrating on a single dimension of his art. Every group is presented alongside works by other artists who contributed to, drew upon, or otherwise resonate with his work. In this sense, Evans is considered not just as one artist but as eight, and a single, complex tradition is traced eight times, each time by a different path.

Just as some photographers seek to create beauty or to express deep emotion, Evans's work can be described as a form of inspired curiosity aimed at specifically framed questions rather than fundamental answers (Masters of Photography). His work has shown that symbol exists in fact, that significance resides in the ordinary, and that descriptive expression can be a vehicle of humor, satire, comedy, and intelligence. Through his photographs, he proved that if an artist looks outward rather than inward, beauty and emotion take care of themselves (Masters of Photography).

Early Life and Education

Born in Saint Louis in 1903, Evans was the son of an advertising executive. His family eventually moved to a new suburb north of Chicago, and his father later took a job in Toledo, Ohio—an upsetting experience for young Walker, who found small-town life among immigrants difficult. After his parents divorced, his mother and sister moved to New York in 1919, while his father remained in Ohio (Capa, Encyclopedia of Photography).

At sixteen, Evans was sent to a boarding school in northern Connecticut, where he developed a keen interest in contemporary literature—Joyce, Eliot, Hemingway, and Pound. He dropped out of college after his freshman year and moved to New York, where he began writing.

He then sailed to Paris for thirteen months of immersion in international modernism, gathering most of the tools he would need to become an artist. After returning to New York in May 1927, he brought back French books, his literary aspirations, and a handful of small photographs. He had also traveled to Europe to study French literature; at that time, no young American abroad felt properly equipped without a camera. With his pocket camera he took a few pictures on a lark. One was of a grim-lipped soldier in the classical Palazzo Reale in Naples; another was a witty juxtaposition of a man with a fanciful four-lantern street lamp that nearly upstaged him (Capa, Encyclopedia of Photography).

He also took several self-portraits in silhouette—his beak-nosed, aristocratic profile—at Juan-les-Pins. On Christmas Day in the Luxembourg Gardens, he handed his camera to his mother, who photographed him full-length in a Chesterfield overcoat and bowler hat, hands in pockets, his narrow triangular face soft with youth (Capa, Encyclopedia of Photography).

He possessed the instinct of a storyteller, as well as an eye for detail and drama that makes lasting literature. However, lacking particular fluency with words, he threw himself into the new medium of photography and applied to it the artistic criteria he had learned from writers. He later taught his students that "Fine photography is literature, and it should be" (Cosmo Polis, 2000).

Carrying the irony of modernist literature in one pocket and the rules and techniques of the Bauhaus in the other, Evans took angle views of Manhattan buildings and street scenes with ascetic grace and a lively spontaneity that would not have been possible a decade earlier. He also took shots of Wall Street windows—an abstract composition worthy of Juan Gris, depicting a grid of black domino-shaped windows in a bleak white wall, viewed through the zigzag of a fire escape (Capa, Encyclopedia of Photography).

In 1929 he photographed the Brooklyn Bridge from underneath, rendering it as a black wedge plunging into a froth of clouds. That same year he took a photograph of 42nd Street showing a Black woman in a cloche hat and fur stole, caught among automobiles, while the photographer was about to be surprised by a policeman descending the stairs from the elevated train. He also developed a series of sign collages, including Broadway (1930), with marquee lights rendered white on black, which appeared on the cover of the trade journal Advertising and Selling (Capa, Encyclopedia of Photography).

By 1930, his work was earning him $125 per photograph. As he began to photograph more seriously, he used his images to illustrate an edition of his friend Hart Crane's The Bridge that year.