DAY 203

FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS

Walker Evans (1903–1975)

FINDING POETRY IN THE ORDINARY

Using his camera like a pen, Walker Evans sought to tell the story of what was American about America, in an unprecedented study of American culture that lasted for nearly half a century. His photos were simple images of common things: Alabama sharecroppers, roadside vegetable stands, and abstract compositions of the twists and turns of New York City. Evans recorded life in its most ordinary forms, without pretense. He was at once historian and anthropologist, believing that “photography is the blade that seizes the dazzling instant from eternity.”

Evans taught himself to use a camera in the late 1920s, and when the Great Depression struck America, he worked for the Farm Security Administration documenting rural poverty and architecture. In 1936, while fortuitously on assignment for Fortune magazine, he traveled with writer James Agee to write a piece on tenant farm families. Although Fortune chose not to run the article, the collaboration yielded a book titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which became some of his best-known work. Shortly after this trip, he turned his focus on the New York City subways and began a three-year project photographing unsuspecting subway riders, which became the book Many Are Called. In 1938, his work was featured at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and was the first solo photography exhibition for the museum.

In his later years, he taught photography at Yale University, until shortly before his death in 1975. —GC