Walker Evans

Walker Evans photographed the American Depression in a style so plain that it took decades for people to see how deliberate it was. He wanted to be a writer, spent a year in Paris failing to become one, and came to photography in his mid-twenties partly in reaction against Stieglitz, whose romanticism he disliked; Lincoln Kirstein was an early supporter and collaborator, and the two photographed Victorian houses in New England together. From 1935 he worked for the Farm Security Administration under Roy Stryker, and the pictures from those years - sharecroppers, shopfronts, roadside signs, a bedroom wall of newspaper - are the ones that fixed how the period looks. He fought Stryker constantly over control and was dismissed in 1937. In summer 1936 he and James Agee lived with three Alabama tenant families for eight weeks on a magazine assignment that was rejected; the result, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941, sold a few hundred copies and is now among the strangest and most admired American books, Agee's enormous self-interrogating prose set against Evans's photographs printed without captions at the front. He rode the New York subway from 1938 with a camera hidden in his coat, shooting passengers who did not know, and held the pictures for twenty-five years before publishing them. He worked at Fortune for two decades and taught at Yale from 1965. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was reissued in 1960 and found the readership it had missed. He insisted his FSA negatives stay public property and they are at the Library of Congress. The subway pictures came out as Many Are Called in 1966. He influenced Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and most American documentary work since.

• Lived: 1903 CE – 1975 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist