Photographic History Collection: Walker Evans
date: label: date made
content: 1929-1963
name: label: maker
content: Evans, Walker
notes: label: Description
content: There are thirty-five photographs by Walker Evans in the Photographic History collection, all purchased from Walker Evans in February 1969. The collection covers the span of Evans’s working life from 1929 to the 1960s, and includes images of New York street life, Southern architecture, photographs taken for FSA, book publications (<i>Crime of Cuba</i> and <i>Mangrove Coast</i>), and <i>Fortune</i> magazine (<i>Chcago: A Camera Exploration</i>). Evans studied and recorded the American way of life throughout his career, providing, through his attention to detail, signage and everyday scenes - an important social and cultural record of the changing face of America.
label: Description
content: Walker Evans (1903-1975) was born in St. Louis. His father was an advertising copywriter and the family moved to Chicago and Toledo, Ohio, before his parents separated in 1918. Evans went with his mother to New York City where he attended a number of boarding schools. As a young man Evans developed an interest in literature and considered a career as a writer. He attended Williams College for a year but found it unsuited to his needs, leaving in the spring of 1923. Three years later he traveled to Paris for a year, and by the end of 1928 had redirected his artistic ambition towards photography.
label: Description
content: Evans studied the work of well-known photographers through the pages of Stightz’s <i>Camera Work</i>. He was particularly struck by the stylistic approach of Paul Strand and the Parisian street photography of Eugene Atget. By the start of the 1930s Evans had established a growing reputation in the New York art world. However, his refusal to undertake commercial assignments left him financially constrained.
label: Description
content: It was during the 1930s that Evans produced some of his most diverse and well-known photography. In 1933 he traveled to Cuba to work on a photographic portfolio for Carleton Beals' book <i>The Crime of Cuba</i>. Concurrently, he produced a series of still life images of art objects. This project led to a larger assignment at MoMA photographing African art. He also experimented with camera formats. Using a 8 X 10 view camera, Evans traveled through the South photographing antebellum houses. January to March 1935 was spent in New Orleans recording the city's architecture and working with the painter Jane Smith Ninas, whom he married in 1941 and divorced in 1955.
label: Description
content: In June 1935, Evans began work for the new government agency, the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA). He formed part of a small team of enthusiastic and innovative photographers bought together under the supervision of Roy Emerson Stryker. The FSA directive was to record the condition of American agriculture and farming communities, and illustrate how the Resettlement Administration was working to address agricultural difficulties. Evans was granted a leave of absence in 1936 to accompany the writer James Agee on an assignment to the South. Agee was working on an article about Southern tenant farmers for <i>Fortune</i> magazine. As a condition of Evans leave, the photographs taken during the assignment were integrated into the growing FSA collection. While the original collaborative article intended for <i>Fortune</i> was never published, in 1941 Agee and Evans did produce a book about Southern tenant farmers, entitled <i>Let Us Now Praise Famous Men</i>. At the time the book was unsuccessful, however, a reprint in the early 1960s led to a reassessment of the publication, and consequently renewed interest in the FSA collection, housed in the Library of Congress. Evans left the FSA in 1937. A year later the images from his period of government employment formed the basis of a MoMA exhibition “American Photographs”—the first one man show by a photographer held at the museum.
label: Description
content: Evans produced a portfolio of images to accompany Karl Bickel's <i>The Mangrove Coast: The Story of the West Coast of Florida</i>, published in 1942. The photographs exhibit Evans eye for detail and flair for capturing everyday people and places. This work has received less public exposure, overshadowed by his subway portraiture of the same period.
label: Description
content: During the 1930s he had undertaken a variety of magazine work, and this became his main form of employment for the next 20 years. From 1945-1965 he worked for <i>Time</i> and then for <i>Fortune</i> magazine, as their only staff photographer. Evans married Isabelle Boeschenstein in 1960, but the marriage ended in divorce ten years later. He had no children from either of his marriages. In 1968 he was named a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and awarded an honorary degree from Williams College. When he retired from magazine work he took up a teaching position at Yale, which he left in 1971. In the same year MoMA held a retrospective of his work entitled Walker Evans. Towards the end of his life Evans worked with the Poloroid SX-70 instant camera. He died in New Haven, Connecticut in April 1975.
setName: label: See more items in
content: Work and Industry: Photographic History
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content: Photography
dataSource: label: Data Source
content: National Museum of American History
identifier: label: ID Number
content: COLL.PHOTOS.000024
objectType: label: Object Name
content: Walker Evans Collection