Walker Evans (1903 to 1975) was an American photographer who worked mostly in the eastern and southern United States from the late 1920s to the 1970s. He photographed houses, storefronts, signs, rooms and the people who lived in them, in spare and closely detailed pictures. He is known above all for the photographs of Alabama tenant farmers he made in the summer of 1936, during the Great Depression.
Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Toledo, Chicago and New York City. He graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover in 1922, spent a year at Williams College, and went to Paris in 1926 hoping to become a writer. He took up photography in 1928 and was largely self-taught. The photographers who shaped him were European: Eugène Atget, who recorded old Paris street by street, and August Sander, who made a methodical portrait of German society. In the 1930s Evans worked for the same government agency as Dorothea Lange, and in 1938 and 1939 he worked with and mentored the young Helen Levitt.
From a stockbroker’s office to the Brooklyn Bridge
Between 1927 and 1929 Evans earned his living as a clerk for a Wall Street stockbroker. His first published photographs appeared in 1930, when three of his pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge were printed in Hart Crane’s book of poetry The Bridge. In 1931 he made a series on Victorian houses in the Boston area, a project sponsored by the writer Lincoln Kirstein. It was an early sign of a lasting interest in photographing buildings as evidence of the people who made and used them.
In May and June of 1933 he went to Cuba for the publisher Lippincott, to make photographs for Carleton Beals’s book The Crime of Cuba. The International Center of Photography also records a solo exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in that year.
Working for the government with an 8×10 camera
In June 1935 the United States Department of the Interior hired Evans to photograph a resettlement community in West Virginia. From October 1935 he was an “information specialist” for the Resettlement Administration, which later became the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The agency’s Information Division, run by Roy Stryker, hired photographers to document the condition of poor farmers during the Depression and to supply pictures to the press. Lange joined in the same year. Gordon Parks joined in 1942.
Evans photographed in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and the southern states. In November 1935 he was in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, photographing the Bethlehem Steel works and St. Michael’s Cemetery. His main camera for this work was an 8×10 inch view camera, a large format instrument that records a great deal of fine detail on a single sheet of film. The pictures he made for the agency belong to the public: about 1,000 of his negatives from this period are held by the Library of Congress and are in the public domain.
What makes a photograph a document and not just a record? Documentary photography covers how photographers tell true stories with pictures.
Eight weeks with three families in Hale County
In the summer of 1936 Fortune magazine sent Evans and the writer James Agee to Alabama to report on the conditions of sharecroppers. They spent eight weeks there, mainly with three white tenant farming families in Hale County: the Burroughs, Tengle and Fields families. Agee stayed in one family’s farmhouse. Evans stayed in a hotel nearby.
Fortune did not publish the story. Agee’s text and Evans’s photographs were published by Houghton Mifflin in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with the families given other names. The first edition contained 31 of Evans’s photographs, and a second edition in 1960 doubled that to 62. The book sold only about half of its first printing. It was later praised and widely studied as a work of both journalism and literature.
A museum book, a hidden camera and twenty years at Fortune
In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art organized the exhibition Walker Evans: American Photographs and published a book of the same name, with an essay by Kirstein. In the same year Evans began photographing passengers on the New York City subway with a hidden camera. Those portraits stayed unpublished for decades and appeared as a book, Many Are Called, in 1966.
Evans received three Guggenheim Fellowships. He joined Fortune in 1945 and stayed until 1965, when he became a professor at the Yale University School of Art, on the graphic design faculty. In 1971 the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work, curated by John Szarkowski. In 1973 he returned to Hale County for the first time since 1936, travelling with the artist William Christenberry and photographing in color with a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera, which he used for his last projects in 1973 and 1974. He died in New Haven, Connecticut, on April 10, 1975.
Curious about the instant prints Evans made at the end of his life? Instant film photography explains how Polaroid and Instax materials work.
How Evans made plain pictures hold attention
The International Center of Photography describes his photographs as precisely composed, intricately detailed and spare, and as pictures that insist on their subject matter. Each of those words points to a choice a photographer can copy.
- Let the subject carry the picture. Evans accepted what was in front of him without visible judgement, and that impartial quality is what made the work seem true. The lesson is to stop adding effect. A kitchen wall, a grave marker or a shop front is shown as itself, and the viewer does the rest.
- Use a camera that slows you down. An 8×10 view camera produces a negative with enough detail that every board, nail and letter can be read. Any camera can be used the same way: steady it, take time over the composition, and make one considered exposure.
- Keep the frame spare. Spare does not mean empty. It means that everything inside the edges is there on purpose. In his picture of the Burroughs kitchen the things shown are few: a bowl on a shelf, a plain towel hanging from a nail.
- Remove the pose when the pose is the problem. On the subway he hid the camera, so that people were recorded as they looked when they did not know they were being photographed. It is an extreme form of candid photography, and it raises questions of consent that each photographer has to answer.
- Think in books, not single frames. American Photographs, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Many Are Called are all sets of pictures meant to be read together. Sequencing was part of the work.
- Printing can be delegated, but not left alone. Evans rarely made his own darkroom prints. He supervised the printing loosely and sent handwritten instructions with the negatives.
In a lecture at Yale in 1964 Evans gave his own approach a name: “lyric documentary”.
Is it fair to photograph strangers who do not know the camera is there? Photography etiquette and ethics sets out the questions to weigh.
Photographs and books to look for
- Brooklyn Bridge photographs (published 1930). Three of these were printed in Hart Crane’s The Bridge. They are his first published pictures, made within two years of his picking up a camera.
- Bethlehem Graveyard and Steel Mill (November 1935). Made in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he photographed St. Michael’s Cemetery and the Bethlehem Steel works. Look at how one frame holds two subjects that comment on each other. The site’s page on juxtaposition explains the idea.
- Allie Mae Burroughs (1936). A portrait of the wife of a cotton sharecropper, made in Hale County when she was 27. It became one of the best known images of the Depression. Evans also made a portrait of her husband, Floyd Burroughs, in the same year.
- Kitchen, Burroughs Home (1936). An interior with no people in it. Notice how few things there are and how each one is given room: the shelf, the bowl, the towel on its nail.
- American Photographs (1938). The book published with his Museum of Modern Art exhibition, with Lincoln Kirstein’s essay. Read it from front to back, as a sequence.
- Many Are Called (made from 1938, published 1966). The subway portraits. Compare the faces with the Hale County portraits, where the sitters knew they were being photographed.
Want to build a set of pictures that works as a whole? How to create a photo essay walks through choosing, ordering and editing a group of photographs.
Try this: one wall, nothing moved
Give yourself 15 minutes and one wall of a room that is in daily use: a kitchen, a workshop, a hallway with hooks. A phone is fine.
- Do not move, tidy or add anything. Photograph the wall as it is.
- Steady the camera on a table, a chair back or a tripod, so that you compose slowly.
- Make only six pictures. Before each one, name out loud every object inside the frame. If you cannot say why something is in the frame, change the framing until it is either clearly in or clearly out.
- Use the light that is already in the room. No flash.
- Afterwards pick the one frame with the fewest things in it that still tells you who uses the room.
The constraint practises the two things the Burroughs kitchen picture does: a spare frame, and acceptance of the subject as found.
Questions people ask about Walker Evans
What is Walker Evans best known for?
He is best known for his Depression era photographs of the American South, above all the pictures of three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, made in 1936 and published in 1941 in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His 1938 book American Photographs and his hidden camera subway portraits are the other works most often cited.
What camera did Walker Evans use?
For his government work in the 1930s his main camera was an 8×10 inch view camera. For the subway portraits he used a hidden camera. In 1973 and 1974 he worked with a Polaroid SX-70 instant camera.
Who wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?
James Agee wrote the text and Walker Evans made the photographs. The book grew out of a Fortune magazine assignment in the summer of 1936 that the magazine never published, and it was issued by Houghton Mifflin in 1941.
Are Walker Evans’s photographs in the public domain?
Some are. About 1,000 negatives that he made for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration are held by the Library of Congress and are in the public domain. His estate transferred its holdings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994, and the museum holds the copyright to the rest of his work.
Walker Evans is one of the photographers in the A to Z of photographers, and he is quoted on the photography quotes page.