European theater

THEATER.

Evans, Walker (1903-1975) photographer

Walker Evans was born on November 3, 1903, the scion of

A wealthy family in Kenilworth, Illinois. He attended Wil

Liams College, Massachusetts, for a single semester before venturing to Paris. There he developed an interest in PHOTOGRAPHY, and he relocated to New York City in 1927 to pursue it. From the outset Evans displayed talents that made him one of America’s greatest photographers. In contrast to the flashier styles of his contemporaries, his work was characterized by a stark and sobering ultrarealism, unembellished by photographic technique. Fascinated by architecture, Evans specialized in depicting the wear and tear of his subjects, especially old buildings, junkyards, railway depots, and other unspectacular venues, and his skill in capturing their dilapidated state catered to tastes contemporaneous with the ongoing social crisis of the Great Depression. By 1930 his studies of New England architecture were so highly regarded that they were assembled into the first one-man photography show ever staged by New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. In the mid-1930s Evans worked for the Resettlement Administration of the New Deal (later absorbed by the Farm Security Administration) and helped chronicle the suffering and

A mother and daughter from a sharecropper family in Hale County, Alabama, are featured in this photo by Walker Evans, 1936. (Library of Congress)

Deprivation of poor people for the enlightenment of the general public. His work proved both riveting and revealing, and in 1936 he ventured into the South with writer Philip Agee to reside among and document the lives of the rural poor in Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi. This led to the publication in 1941 of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was hailed as an American classic and helped to visually document the depression era.

Evans quit fieldwork in 1943 to serve as photographic editor of Time magazine, and two years later he transferred to the publication Fortune. He remained there for two decades and gained additional renown for numerous photoessays. In 1965 Evans relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, where he became a professor of graphic design at Yale University. At the time he developed an obsession for the new Polaroid Land camera and utilized the new technology to take 2,000 additional photographs. Evans taught at Yale until his death at New Haven on April 10, 1975, and is still regarded as among the very best photographers to emerge from the Great Depression and a driving force behind the nascent documentary arts movement.

See also Dorothea Lange.

Further reading: Giles Mora, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (New York: H. N. Abrams, 2004).

—John C. Fredriksen