Walker Evans

Infobox Person
name = Walker Evans

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image_size = 250px
caption = Walker Evans in 1937
birth_date = birth date|1903|11|3|mf=y
birth_place = St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.A.
death_date = death date and age|1975|4|10|1903|11|3|mf=y
death_place = New Haven, Connecticut, U.S.A.:"For the off-road and NASCAR driver, see Walker Evans (racer)."Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent"Metropolitan Museum of Art. [http://www.metmuseum.org/special/walkerevans/learn.htm More about Walker Evans.] Retrieved September 13, 2008.] . Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums, and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art ["Walker Evans", by Jeff L. Rosenheim, Maria Morris Hambourg, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman (Princeton University Press, 2000) ISBN-10 0691050783, ISBN-13 978-0691050782] .

Biography

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans was part of a well-to-do family. He graduated from Phillips Academy, in Andover, Mass. He studied literature for a year at Williams College before dropping out. After spending a year in Paris, he returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends.

Evans took up photography in 1928. In 1933, he photographed in Cuba on assignment for the publisher of Carleton Beals' then-forthcoming book, "The Crime of Cuba," photographing the revolt against the dictator Gerardo Machado. In Cuba, Evans briefly knew Ernest Hemingway.

In 1935, Evans spent two months at first on a fixed-term photographic campaign for the Resettlement Administration (RA) in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. From October on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern states.

In the summer of 1936, while still working for the FSA, he and writer James Agee were sent by "Fortune" magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Noting a similarity to the Beals' book, the critic Janet Malcolm, in her 1980 book Diana & Nikon: Essays on the Aesthetic of Photography, has pointed out the contradiction between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers.

The three families headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs and Frank Tingle, lived in the Hale County town of Akron, Alabama, and the owners of the land on which the families worked told them that Evans and Agee were "Soviet agents," although Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd's wife, recalled during later interviews her discounting that information. Evan's photographs of the families made them icons of Depression-Era misery and poverty. In September 2005, "Fortune" revisited Hale County and the descendants of the three families for its 75th anniversary issueWhitford, David. [http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/09/19/8272885/index.htm The Most Famous Story We Never Told.] "Fortune", September 19, 2005.] . Charles Burroughs, who was four years old when Evans and Agee visited the family, was "still angry" at them for not even sending the family a copy of the book; the son of Floyd Burroughs was also reportedly angry because the family was "cast in a light that they couldn't do any better, that they were doomed, ignorant".

Evans continued to work for the FSA until 1938. That year, an exhibition, "Walker Evans: American Photographs," was held at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. This was the first exhibition in this museum devoted to the work of a single photographer. The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans had befriended in his early days in New York.

In 1938, Evans also took his first photographs in the New York subway with a camera hidden in his coat. These would be collected in book form in 1966 under the title "Many are Called." In 1938 and 1939, Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt.

Evans, like such other photographers as Henri Cartier-Bresson, rarely spent time in the darkroom making prints from his own negatives. He only very loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure.

Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at "Time" magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at "Fortune" magazine through 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography on the faculty for Graphic Design at the Yale University School of Art (formerly the Yale School of Art and Architecture).

In 1971, the Museum of Modern Art staged a further exhibition of his work entitled simply "Walker Evans".

Evans died in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1975.

In 1994, The Estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City's The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [ [http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/05/43902 "Wired" Magazine. "Is It Art, or Memorex?" by Reena Jana. March 21, 2001.] ] The Metropolitan Museum of Art is the sole copyright holder for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans. The only exception is a group of approximately 1,000 negatives in collection of the Library of Congress which were produced for the Resettlement Administration (RA) / Farm Security Administration (FSA). Evan's RA / FSA works are in the public domain. [ [http://www.masters-of-photography.com/E/evans/evans_copyright.html Masters of Photography website: Walker Evans page] ]

In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame. [ [http://stlouiswalkoffame.org/inductees/walker-evans.html St. Louis Walk of Fame website: Walker Evans page] ]

ee also

*Photojournalism

Footnotes

References

* [http://www.geh.org/taschen/htmlsrc10/m197100060001_ful.html "Furniture Store Sign, Birmingham, Alabama"]
* [http://www.stlouiswalkoffame.org/inductees/walker-evans.html Walker Evans Entry] on the St. Louis Walk of Fame
* [http://www.argus-fotokunst.de/en/exhibition/evans.html Walker Evans exhibition in the argus fotokunst art gallery in Berlin.]
* [http://hubpages.com/hub/Walker_Evans_or_Is_It Walker Evans or is It? Digital Reproductions]

Further reading

*cite book | author=Rathbone, Belinda | title=Walker Evans: A Biography | publisher=Thomas Allen & Son Ltd. | year=2002 | id=ISBN 0-618-05672-6
*cite book | author=Storey, Isabelle | title=Walker's Way: My Years With Walker Evans | publisher=powerHouse Books | year=2007 | id=ISBN 978-1-57687-362-5
*cite book | last = Hambourg | first = Maria Morris | coauthors = Jeff Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman| title = Walker Evans | publisher = Princeton University Press / The Metropolitan Museum of Art | year =2000| id = ISBN 0-691-11965-1
*cite book | last = Rosenheim|first = Jeff|coauthors = Douglas Eklund| editor= Alexis Scwarzenbach |others = Maria Morris Hambourg|title = Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology|publisher = Scalo / The Metropolitan Museum of Art |id = ISBN 3-908247-21-7
*cite book | last = Leicht|first = Michael | title = Wie Katie Tingle sich weigerte, ordentlich zu posieren und Walker Evans darüber nicht grollte | publisher = transcript Verlag, Bielefeld | year = 2006 | id = ISBN 3-89942-436-0

External links

* [http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artMakerDetails?maker=1634 Biography of the artist Walker Evans] from the J. Paul Getty Museum
* [http://ericetheridge.com/wordblog/archives/2007/08/the_missing_cri.html/ Tod Papageorge on Walker Evans and Robert Frank]
* [http://www.artnet.com/awc/walker-evans.html Walker Evans catalogue in artnet's "Artist Works Catalogues"]