born Nov. 3, 1903, St. Louis, Mo., U.S.
died April 10, 1975, New Haven, Conn.
U.S. photographer.
He was influenced early by the photographs of Eugène Atget . In 1934 his images of New England architecture were exhibited in the first one-man photographic show at the Museum of Modern Art. From 1935 he photographed rural victims of the Great Depression for the Farm Security Administration; these images were published in American Photographs (1938). He collaborated with James Agee to document the life of Alabama sharecroppers in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). Evans's photographs appeared without titles or comment, in a section separate from Agee's text, yet the whole constitutes one of the finest collaborations between a photographer and a writer. He was later an editor of Fortune magazine (1945–65) and a professor at Yale University (1965–74).