b. 1903 St. Louis, Missouri, d. 1975 New Haven,
Connecticut
photographer
American
Walker Evans began to photograph in the late 1920s,
making snapshots during a European trip. Upon his return to
New York, he published his first images in 1930. During the
Great Depression, Evans began to photograph for the
Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm
Security Administration (FSA), documenting workers and
architecture in the Southeastern states. In 1936 he traveled
with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant
farm families for Fortune magazine; the book Let Us Now
Praise Famous Men came out of this collaboration.
Throughout his career Evans contributed photographs to
numerous publications, including three devoted solely to his
work. In 1965 he left Fortune, where he had been a staff
photographer for twenty years, to become a professor of
photography and graphic design at Yale University. He
remained in the position until 1974, a year before his death.
New York City Lunch Counter, 1930
Photographed through a large plate window, these three
diners appear engrossed in getting a fast bite to eat,
entertained all the while by the activity on the street. Only the
man on the right appears aware of the photographer's
presence directly opposite them on the sidewalk. Assembled
like a frieze across the front of this storefront lunch counter,
the men are both familiar and anonymous in their dark suits,
white shirts, and ties. Walker Evans clearly enjoyed this post
outside the busy lunch counter, and he stayed to photograph
several other trios of unsuspecting customers.
For the purposes of Walker Evans's continuing quest to
obtain anonymous portraits, the subway was the place
"where the people of the city range themselves at all hours
under the most constant conditions." In order to remain
inconspicuous, Evans used a hidden camera: a small, fast
Contax that he painted flat black, strapped to his chest, and
operated with a long wire strung down his right sleeve. In
1966 he published the images with James Agee's
introduction as the book Many Are Called.
Open-End Crescent Wrench, German Manufacture, 56
Cents, 1955
Among low-priced, factory-produced goods, none is so
appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. . . . Aside
from their functions though they are exclusively wedded to
function each of these tools lures the eye to follow its curves
and angles, and invites the hand to test its balance.
Walker Evans's introduction to "Beauties of the
Common Tool," an article that appeared in the July 1955
issue of Fortune magazine, makes clear his appreciation for
the most ordinary apparatus. Photographing pliers, chisels,
trowels, scissors, and bevels was a fitting assignment for
Evans, who found items of everyday use intriguing. Using
plain surfaces and extended exposures so that his largeformat
negatives would capture every nuance of texture,
Evans transformed mundane tools like this crescent wrench
into works of sculpture.
Trash NYC, 1962, 1967
No subject was too insignificant for Walker Evans, who
transformed scattered litter on a New York City street into a
graphic, abstract composition of complex shapes floating in
an indefinable space. The seeping stain on the grimy street
becomes a textured, almost lunar surface, otherworldly yet
compelling. No mundane detail escaped his eye either, as
spent cigarette butts and crumpled paper stand against the
gritty black ground like small pieces of sculpture.
4 Men with Ties, 1963
In 1963 Walker Evans assembled a series of more than
eighty pictures that he described as a "random check of all
kinds of men" and declared that, except for the loyal railroad
yard men, almost no one was maintaining the standards of a
"classic job costume." For Evans, the working man was now
everyman, and, because so much of the population had
moved into the city, every man was now the man-in-thestreet.
In opposition to the current men's fashion
photography, Evans called his work "documentary fashion
photography."
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