Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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Walker Evans, Wrench, 1955
gelatin silver print
10 x 8 in.

Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903 and was raised in Kenilworth, Illinois. After attending Williams College, he lived in Paris and took courses at the Sorbonne. He settled in New York in 1927 and started taking photographs the following year. His first photographs, of early Victorian houses in New England and New York, were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. In 1935 he spent time in Mississippi and Alabama photographing tenant farmers and sharecroppers; these photographs were published in a collaborative book with the writer James Agee titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). In 1945 Evans became a staff photographer and then an associate editor for Fortune magazine, where he worked until 1965. There he published many photographic portfolios, including "Beauties of the Common Tool" (July 1955), which he introduced by writing that "almost all basic small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candor and purity." After leaving the magazine, he became a professor of graphic design at Yale University, where he remained until his death in 1975. He received many awards, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1940. His work has been exhibited internationally and is included in most major museum collections of photography. Along with Berenice Abbott and Dorothea Lange, Evans established the tradition of documentary photography. He was profoundly affected by the social problems of his time and felt a sense of responsibility to point up the plight of the less fortunate. By striving to make his images as detached and unemotional as he could, by removing sentiment and beauty, Evans endowed these social commentaries with profound impact.