Walker Evans (1903 to 1975)
Walker Evans was born born in St. Louis on November 3, 1903. He worked mostly in black and white, and didn’t use any fancy equipment or techniques. He took pictures with an old beat-up camera with a slow lens and developed his pictures with rudimentary materials. He tried to capture images of the failed American promise, portraits of sharecroppers, old automobiles, faded signs, ghost towns of the West, decrepit factories. He compiled these pictures in his book American Photographs in 1938.
Evans originally wanted to be a writer. He dropped out of Williams College after a year, went to New York to try to write, and then sailed off to Paris where he took classes at the Sorbonne and read Flaubert and Baudelaire. He said “I wanted so much to write that I couldn’t write a word.” But he took photography lessons and found that he felt completely comfortable behind the lens of a camera. He came back to the United States and got a job as a Wall Street stock clerk, where he met the poet Hart Crane. His first published pictures were three photographs that accompanied Crane’s book-length poem “The Bridge”, about the Brooklyn Bridge.
Evans worked with writer James Agee on a project called “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families” (1941), in which they documented the lives of three sharecropping families in Alabama. Evans and Agee spent four weeks one summer living with and getting to know the families they were depicting. Agee wrote the text, and Evans provided 31 photographs.
Walker Evans said, “With a camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless.”
Information courtesy of Swann Galleries Inc., October 2003