Walker Evans

He wanted to be a writer. Evans had the money and the time to try — his father was an advertising director, and the childhood ran comfortably from St. Louis through Toledo and Chicago to New York, Phillips Academy, and a year of French literature at Williams College before he dropped out. In 1926 he spent a year in Paris trying to write and came home without a book. He clerked for a Wall Street firm, kept company with Hart Crane and Lincoln Kirstein, and in 1928 picked up a camera instead. It was a second choice, and it decided everything after: he spent his life asking the lens to do what he believed prose did, describe a thing exactly and refuse to comment on it.

In 1935 he joined the federal agency that became the Farm Security Administration and photographed the Depression South on an 8-by-10 view camera. The next summer, on assignment for Fortune, he and the writer James Agee spent eight weeks in Hale County, Alabama, living with three white tenant farming families. Fortune killed the story. It appeared in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, sold about 600 copies, and vanished — until a 1960 reissue found its audience. In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art gave him American Photographs, the first show it ever devoted to one photographer.

Nobody asked the Hale County families how they wished to be shown. They were tenant farmers photographed under a federal program and given pseudonyms they had not chosen. When Fortune went back in 2005 the anger had not gone. Charles Burroughs, four then, said the family never received a copy of the book. A grandson said his people were cast as doomed and ignorant. Laura Tingle said she wished the two men had never come. Two great-grandsons said what they felt was pride. Separately, Evans rode the New York subway from 1938 with a camera hidden in his coat, photographing strangers without their knowledge, and withheld the pictures for 25 years. Dorothea Lange worked the same program with sympathy. Evans held that the flat, unsentimental picture was the more honest one, and disliked the propaganda impulse in the program.

He gave 20 years to Fortune, from 1945 to 1965, writing and editing photographic essays for a business magazine — an odd berth for him, and a productive one. That year he went to Yale to teach photography in the School of Art. In 1973 and 1974, old and frail, he worked almost entirely with the Polaroid SX-70, the company supplying him film without limit. He died of a stroke in New Haven on April 10, 1975, hours after a telephone call about a new book. The American documentary style is largely his — Robert Frank's road, Diane Arbus's frontal stare, and most of what has been made in that line since runs back through him.

Walker Evans's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bethlehem Graveyard and Steel Mill artwork
  Pennsylvania headstones standing in front of the smokestacks 1935
• Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama artwork
  A tenant farmer's wife at 27, and the most reproduced picture he made 1936
• American Photographs book
  The MoMA catalogue, with an essay by Lincoln Kirstein 1938
• Let Us Now Praise Famous Men book
  With James Agee. About 600 copies sold before it went out of print 1941
• Many Are Called book
  The subway portraits, held back roughly 25 years 1966

• November 3, 1903 aged 0 Born in St. Louis to an advertising director and his wife The family moved on to Toledo, Chicago and New York.
• 1926 aged ~23 Spends a year in Paris trying to become a writer He came home without a book and joined a literary crowd in New York instead.
• 1928 aged ~25 Takes up photography while clerking for a Wall Street firm His first published pictures appeared in 1930, in Hart Crane's poem The Bridge.
• 1935 aged ~32 Joins the federal program that becomes the Farm Security Administration He worked mainly in the South and stayed until 1938.
• Summer 1936 aged ~33 Spends eight weeks in Hale County, Alabama with James Agee Fortune commissioned the story and then declined to run it.
• 1938 aged ~35 MoMA opens American Photographs, its first one-person photography show The same year he began photographing subway riders with a camera hidden in his coat.
• 1941 aged ~38 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is published and barely sells About 600 copies. A 1960 reissue turned it into a standard text.
• 1965 aged ~62 Leaves Fortune after two decades and joins the Yale faculty He taught photography in the School of Art.
• April 10, 1975 aged 71 Dies of a stroke at his apartment in New Haven

• Dorothea Lange 1895–1965
  Documentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined the visual record of the 1930s. worked the same program as
• Diane Arbus 1923–1971
  Photographer whose square-format portraits remade American documentary photography influenced
• Richard Avedon 1923–2004
  Put movement into fashion photography, then stripped his subjects bare against white paper. influenced
• Alfred Stieglitz 1864–1946
  Photographer and gallerist who established photography as fine art and promoted American modernists. reacted against