This paper examines the life and work of Walker Evans (1903–1975), widely regarded as a founding figure of American documentary photography. Beginning with his early years in Saint Louis and Paris and his turn away from writing toward the camera, the paper traces his stylistic development through the 1930s—covering his Farm Security Administration work, his collaboration with writer James Agee on what became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and his landmark exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The paper also discusses Evans as an individual, including his politics, personal relationships, and teaching career, before analyzing key photographs and evaluating his lasting influence on American art and culture.
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).
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.
Also in 1930, at the recommendation of Lincoln Kirstein, Evans documented early Victorian houses in New England and New York; these were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. He developed his own documentary style as an antipode to Stieglitz, refining his concept of the subject toward images that appear simple, clear-cut, and irreducibly right (Cosmo Polis, 2000).
In the 1930s he produced celebrated photographs of the Depression era in the American South. In 1931 he traveled to New England to document Victorian architecture. His first solo exhibition was held at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932 (Cosmo Polis, 2000). In 1933 he traveled to Cuba to provide illustrations for Carleton Beals's book The Crime of Cuba, and in 1934 he traveled through the mid-Atlantic states and the South. In 1935 he photographed African art objects for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art intended for distribution to colleges and libraries through the General Education Board (Cosmo Polis, 2000).
That same year he began working for the U.S. Resettlement Administration, documenting social conditions during the Depression. It was during this second period, from 1931 to 1935, that Evans mastered his skills and developed what might be called a full "palette" (Cosmo Polis, 2000).
Among the most striking works from this period is his photograph Maine Pump, with its counterpoint of Gothic lines: a cupola-topped wooden awning with a gingerbread, scalloped frieze shelters a slender black pump and its wooden sluice, while a grey cupola peaks to a spindle and the canopy is bracketed to a pointed archway over one of two adjacent doors of the house (Cosmo Polis, 2000).
He was later hired by Roy Stryker of the Farm Security Administration, where he participated in the FSA's photographic survey of rural America over the next four years, reporting mainly on southern states. Simultaneously, he photographed pre-Civil War architecture for his own interests (Cosmo Polis, 2000).
In the summer of 1936, Evans took a leave of absence from the FSA to work on a Fortune magazine project with writer James Agee. The two men lived with Alabama sharecropper families for nearly two months. Fortune rejected their work, but Evans and Agee eventually published it as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941 (Jonathan, 2002). The book became a classic.
Evans also accepted a professorship and taught Graphic Design from 1965 until his death in New Haven ten years later. He advised his students "to have a cultivated life and an education; they'd make better photographs" (Jonathan, 2002). He regarded this advice as especially relevant to "the psychology of camera work," arguing: "A man who has faith, intelligence, and cultivation will show that in his work. Passion he does not mention, because it cannot be acquired or reliably controlled. Without it there is no enduring art." The photographs Evans took for the FSA and published in that volume represent some of his most significant and influential work (Jonathan, 2002).
Beginning in 1938, Evans started taking candid photographs of subway riders and street people, relinquishing control of framing and lighting in order to capture the purest possible record of the moment. From 1943 to 1945 he was a staff writer for Time magazine (Jonathan, 2002). He then rejoined as a staff writer and the sole staff photographer at Fortune from 1945, working there for the next twenty years in those roles as well as an independent associate editor. Fortune published many of his photo-essays alongside his own texts (Jonathan, 2002).
Evans became a major influence on Robert Frank and Helen Levitt, who later took cues from his "Subway Photographs" and "Labor Anonymous." However, as photo editor at Fortune he gradually lost his passion for black-and-white photography and turned to photographing tin snips, tugs, and crate openers suspended in space. He also shot color stories such as "The Wreckers," which illustrated the "loving destruction of a building," and "Along the Right of Way," which depicted landscapes glimpsed through a train window (Jonathan, 2002).
"Evans's personality, politics, and personal relationships"
"Metropolitan exhibition and key photograph analyses"
To evaluate the exhibit at the Metropolitan is to recognize that Evans's aesthetic and his direction were well formed by 1928. He made his preference toward the "functionalism" of the Bauhaus—toward Feininger and Mies van der Rohe. Evans outflanked Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Paul Haviland by denouncing Stieglitz as "too arty," preferring instead the direct documentary style of Paul Strand, whose famous photograph of a blind beggar had been an epiphany for the young Evans.
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