Evan Walker

1. Evan Walker By: Lizzie Abshire

2. Basic Information • Walker Evans was born in 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri. • He dabbled with painting as a child, collected picture postcards, and made snapshots of his family and friends with a small Kodak camera.

3. Walker’s Photographs • His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists. • The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. • His principal subject was the vernacular-the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafes, advertisements, simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets.

4. Walkers’ Photographs • His principal subject was the indigenous expressions of people found in roadside stands, cheap cafes, advertisements, simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. • His principal subject was the vernacular-the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafes, advertisements, simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. • For fifty years, late 1920's to early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making.

5. Photographer or Writer? • After a year at Williams College, he quit school and moved to New York City, finding work in bookstores and at the New York Public Library, where he could freely indulge his passion for writing. • In 1927, after a year in Paris polishing his French and writing short stories and nonfiction essays, Evans returned to New York intent on becoming a writer. • He also took up the camera and gradually redirected his aesthetic impulses to bring the strategies of literature-lyricism, irony, incisive description, and narrative structure- into the medium of photography

7. Information • Most of Evans' early photographs reveal the influence of European modernism, specifically its formalism and emphasis on dynamic graphic structures. • Gradually moved away from this highly aesthetic zed style to develop his own evocative but more reticent notions of realism of the spectator's role, and the poetic resonance of ordinary subjects. • The depression years of 1935-36 were ones of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. • In June 1935 he accepted a job from the U.S. department of the interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. • He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an 'information specialist' in the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture.

8. Information • His photographs of roadside architecture, rural churches, small-town barbers, and cemeteries reveal a deep respect for the neglected traditions of the common man and secured his reputation as America’s preeminent documentaries. • From their first appearance in magazines and books in the late 1930s, these direct, iconic images entered the public's collective consciousness and are now deeply embedded in the nation's shared visual history of the Depression. • Evans worked with little concern for the ideological agenda or the suggested itineraries and instead answered a personal need to distill the essence of American life from the simple and the ordinary.

9. Information Continued • In the summer of 1936, he took a leave of absence from the Resettlement Administration to travel to the South with his friend, who had been assigned to write an article on tenant farmers by Fortune magazine; Evans was to be the photographer. • The Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) is a lyric journey of direct observation. It is a 500 pages of words and pictures and is a volatile mix of documentary description and intensely subjective, even autobiographical writing, endures as one of the seminal achievements of twentieth-century American letters. Evans photographs for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are stunningly honest representations of the faces, bedrooms, and clothing of individual farmers living on a dry hillside seventeen miles north of Greensboro, Alabama. • As a series, they seem to have elucidated the whole tragedy of the Great Depression; are intimate, transcendent, and enigmatic.

10. Evans’ Photographs • For many years Evans’ photographs are the apogee of his career in photography. • During 1938-1941, Evans produced a remarkable series of portrait in the New York City subway. • They remained unpublished for twenty-five years, until 1966, when Houghton Mifflin released Many Are Called, a book of eighty-nine photographs, with an introduction by James Agee written in 1940. • With a 35mm Contax camera strapped to his chest, its lens peeking out between two buttons of his winter coat, Evans was able to photograph his fellow passengers, and at close range. • Although the setting was public, his subjects, unposed and lost in their own thoughts, displayed a constantly shifting medley of moods and expressions--by turns curious, bored, amused, despondent, dreamy, and dyspeptic. • "The guard is down and the mask is off," he remarked. "Even more than in lone bedrooms (where there are mirrors), people's faces are in naked response down in the subway."

11. His Work • In 1934-1965, he contributed more than 400 photographs to 45 articles published in Fortune magazine. • He worked at the luxe magazine as Special Photographic Editor from 1945 to 1965 and not only conceived of the portfolios, executed the photographs, and designed the page layouts, but also wrote the accompanying text. • His topics were executed with both black-and-white and color materials and including railroad company journalistic picture-story format, he combined his interest in words and pictures and created a multidisciplinary narrative or unusually high quality. • Classics of a neglected genre, were his métier for twenty years.

12. Critique • Evan Walker was a good photographer because he used and saw neat things and turned them into better things even though he was in the Depression Era. He also took pictures of things you wouldn’t thing about and would turn them into something different and interesting. • His photographs are the kind that speak to you, so it’s just not a picture, it has a story and meaning behind it. • Some of the pictures could have been a little more clearer then what they turned out to be. All in all, his photographs are good and they show how hard it was in the Depression Era.

13. Works Cited • http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm