Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903 and was raised in Kenilworth, Illinois. He died in 1975 at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut. After attending Williams College, Massachusetts, 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. After leaving the magazine, he became a professor of graphic design at Yale University’s School of Art, Connecticut. 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. Along with Bernice Abbot 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 focus on the plight of the less fortunate. By striving to make his images as detached and unemotional as he could, Evans endowed these social commentaries with profound impact.

*Excerpted from Tools as Art: The Hechinger Collection, published by Harry N. Abrams Inc.