Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist, known for his realistically depicting images everyday rural scenes of the Great Depression of 1930. Later he collaborated with other media, especially Time and Fortune magazines. The photos of him stood out for his humanity and his realism. Images of Alabama sharecroppers, like those of Dorothea Lange, are among the icons of the modern world.

Evans finds beauty in mundane, everyday objects. His goal as a photographer was to produce intelligent, authoritative, and transcendent photographs.

Evans was born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, into a middle-class family: his father was an employee in an advertising agency. He spent his youth in various cities in the eastern United States, such as Toledo, Chicago, and New York. After graduating in literature from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he studied French literature for a year at Williams College in 1922-1923. Despite dropping out, he continued his interest in literature to such an extent that 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, until his literary interest led him to dream of the obligatory pilgrimage of all intellectuals in the 1920s: live in Paris. In 1926 he enrolled at the Sorbonne to continue his studies in literature and languages, with the aim of becoming a writer.

In 1928, while living in Ossining, New York,  he became interested in the world of photography as a means of capturing everyday reality due to its similarities with poetry. He was inspired by photographers such as Eugène Atget and August Sander. He used a 6x12 camera, which he replaced shortly after with a 15x20, with which he toured some cities in the United States together with the intellectual and patron Lincoln Kirstein. The novelist John Cheever and the poet Hart Crane were also part of the group of artists and writers with whom he lived in New York. From 1927 to 1929, he worked as a clerk at a stock brokerage firm on Wall Street.

In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in his friend Hart Crane's book of poetry entitled The Bridge. A year later, another of his friends, Lincoln Kirstein, commissioned him to photograph a series of Victorian houses in the Boston area.

Evans spent May and June 1933 in Cuba, where he took a series of photographs that served to illustrate the work The Crime of Cuba. , a book by journalist Carleton Beals in which the situation on the island was denounced during the term of Gerardo Machado y Morales. During his time in Cuba, he met Ernest Hemingway for drinks every night, with whom he formed such a friendship that he even lent him money to extend his stay a few weeks. Through his photographs, he documented street life, the police presence, beggars and stevedores in deplorable conditions and coastal scenes. He also helped Hemingway acquire photographs from newspaper archives documenting the political violence he later describes in his book, To Have and Have Not (1937). Before leaving, fearing that the Cuban authorities would confiscate his photographs as critical of the government, Evans decides to leave 46 of them with Hemingway. He then returned to the United States, where Beals's book with 31 of his photographs was published. It was not until 2002 that the photographs that she had left with Hemingway in Havana were discovered and exhibited.

During 1935, in the middle of the Great Depression, Evans did photographic work for the new government agencies in the United States. He began a two-month project in the states of West Virginia and Pennsylvania for the Resettlement Administration (RA), the agency for relocating the homeless to government-planned communities. He continued to work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), the successor agency to the RA which aimed to combat poverty in rural areas of the country, especially in the southern states.

In the summer of 1936, still working for the agency, he and writer James Agee were assigned to Hale County, Alabama to do a project for Fortune magazine, who later decided not to publish it. In 1941, the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is published with Evans's photographs and Agee's writings. In it, they recount his stay with three white sharecropper families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression, painting a deeply moving image of rural poverty. The book conveys a poetic but cold interpretation of the vision of the sharecroppers of the South, richly documented with photographs and texts. Critics of the book highlight the contrast between Agee's prose that expresses anger, anguish and suffering, and Evans's photographs that reflect serenity and beauty when portraying peasants.

The three families, headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs, and Frank Tingle, lived in the town of Akron, Alabama in Hale County. The families' landowners and employers informed them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents", although Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of Floyd Burroghs, recounted in later interviews having dismissed such information at the time. Evans's photographs made families icons of the poverty and misfortune of the depression years. In September 2005, Fortune magazine returned to Hale County to visit the descendants of the three families for its 75th anniversary issue. Charles Burroughs, who was four years old at the time of Evans and Agee's visit, expressed his annoyance with them for not even sending his family a copy of the book and for portraying them as ignorant, condemning, and hopeless.

Evans continued to work for the government agency FSA until 1938, the year the exhibition Walker Evans: American Photographs was presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the first exhibition monograph on architectural photos and the first dedicated to the work of a single photographer. The exhibition catalog included an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, with whom Evans formed a friendship early in his arrival in New York.

That same year, Evans took the first photographs of himself on the New York subway with a camera he hid in his coat. They were published until 1966 in his book, Many are Called. In the years 1938 and 1939, Evans mentored the renowned photographer Helen Levitt.

Evans, like many other photographers, including Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom developing photographs from his negatives, only supervising the process in most cases. cases, sometimes annotating indications on the negatives themselves.

In 1940, he was awarded a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Evans was a dedicated reader and writer. In 1945, he joined Time magazine as a writer. Shortly thereafter, he became an editor for Fortune magazine and remained until 1965. Between 1945 and 1965, as Fortune's editor, he conducted photo essays on various subjects. Among them: The New York Subway, Ghost Towns of the American West, and Ancient Churches.

From 1965 until his death in 1975, he taught photography at the Yale University School of Art, where he managed to obtain a professorship.

One of his last projects, published in 1968, was a collection of black and white photos of one of the largest and oldest private American banks, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. In the years 1973 and 1974, he took an extensive series of photos using the newest camera of the day, the Polaroid SX-70. His advancing age and failing health prevented him from working with more elaborate photographic equipment.

The first definitive retrospective of his work was presented at MoMA in New York in early 1971. As the museum's press release puts it, individually his photographs evoke a undeniable sense of a certain place, but collectively they evoke a sense of what America is all about. The exhibition was called simply Walker Evans and the selection was made by fellow photographer John Szarkowski. Evans died at his home in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975 from a brain hemorrhage.

His work was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994, when The Estate of Walker Evans, the owners of his work, turned over his shares. All rights correspond, therefore, to the MET, except for the photos he took for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration, about 1000 negatives, which are kept by the Library of Congress. That part of his work is in the public domain. Ultimately, he left all his possessions to his adopted children.

In 2000, Evans was recognized as a part of the St. Louis Walk of Fame.19​20​

(Source Wikipedia)

Take a look at some of his images