EVANS, WALKER

born Nov. 3, 1903, St. Louis, Mo., U.S. died April 10, 1975, New Haven, Conn. American photographer, important primarily for documenting the effects of economic depression in the American South and photographically interpreting American folk architecture. His approach to photography was largely formed by the documentary photographs of the French photographer Eugne Atget, whose influence is apparent in Evans' series of photographs, begun in 1930, of 19th-century architecture of New England. In 1934 these photographs were shown in the first one-man show given to a photographer at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. In 1935 Evans began to photograph the rural victims of the Great Depression for the Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration ) of the U.S. government. With his large-view camera he recorded virtually every facet of their lives, capturing their pride and individuality as much through their artifacts and dwellings as through their faces. These direct, seemingly artless photographs were collected in the book American Photographs (1938; reissued 1975). In 1936 Evans took leave from the FSA to travel to Alabama with writer James Agee to document the life of sharecroppers for Fortune magazine. Although their study never appeared in the magazine, it was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941; reissued 1966). Evans' 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. From 1945 to 1965 Evans was an associate editor of Fortune magazine. He continued to photograph architecture, especially rural churches, but his most remarkable work of those years was a series of photographs of people taken in the New York City subways. Out of courtesy to those his camera had so thoroughly revealed, however, Evans did not publish the photographs in book form, as Many are Called, until 1966. He was a professor of graphic design at Yale University from 1965 to 1974, becoming emeritus in 1974.