Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1903 and after his education, spent time in Paris living the bohemian life before returning to America in the late 1920s. Intending on becoming a writer, he became a photographer instead. Evans had taken up photography in 1928, at the age of twenty-five. It afforded him the opportunity to live, as he said, "very shabbily" in New York City. He experimented with photography by taking pictures of the city street life and vernacular architecture and by making portraits of his artist and intellectual friends. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, his paid projects included illustrating a book that exposed the evils of Cuba's Machado regime and photographing African sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art.

Evans came to the Farm Resettlement Administration (FRA) after doing some part-time work at the Department of the Interior. His ideas about the systematic documentation of American culture impressed and influenced Roy Stryker, head of the Photographic Unit at FRA. In notes written in 1934 and 1935 concerning the creation of photographs by the federal government, Evans called for images that would be a "pure record not propaganda," and he composed a list of subjects that resembled Stryker's later shooting scripts. During the eighteen months or so that he worked at the agency, he photographed in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee.

Evans and Stryker parted company during 1937 and Evans returned to New York, where he worked on his exhibit and book, American Photographs, and continued to prepare his contribution to "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," and began to make a series of photographs in the city's subways.

Evans probably knew little about social and economic conditions of the neighborhoods he captured on film. He was inclined to argue that photographers did not need such knowledge. The act of photographing, he told Leslie Katz, is "all done instinctively, as far as I can see, not consciously." This is consistent with Evans's diffidence at the application of the label "documentary" to his photographs. "The term should be documentary style," he told Katz. "You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style."

His stated goal for his work was to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent." The resulting work offers an important study of American culture in the middle decades of the 20th century.

Medium : 1 nitrate negative

Created/Published : July, 1935

Creator : Walker Evans, photographer, 1903-1975

Part of the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress

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Product #: cph8c52044