What is walker evans known for

He chose it for inclusion in his first solo exhibition at MoMA in The exhibition, entitled American Photographs , and subsequently published as a book, otherwise contained images of the American Northeast. The inclusion of a Cuban scene amongst these images of North America reflects a diplomatic closeness between the U.

Evans's early photographs of dockworkers, street vendors, policemen, and beggars reveal an ability to capture a range of information, from the micro to the macro - the minutest idiosyncrasies of a culture and its overall context, doing with images what a writer might try to do in words.

Shot on assignment for the Farm Security Administration in November of , this quiet, unassuming view of the steel manufacturing town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania reflects Evans's mastery of poetry in visual form. Though shot in a residential neighborhood, there are no figures in this quiet elegy to the generations of steel workers for whom life begins and ends here. In a reverse progression from the cradle to the grave, the eye travels from the large weathered cross in the foreground to the similarly structured power leading down the hill into the middle distance.

Before we reach the river, however, smokestacks rise up, blocking access to this "cradle of civilization" and the distant shore beyond it, where stately homes appear on the horizon. In this symbolic overview of a steel-worker's life, class tensions are evident.

The presence of the cross suggests the structure religion provides for those who go through life without having the privilege to examine their place in the universe. As Evans recommended to other artists and outside-the-box thinkers, "die knowing something.

You are not here long. His job was to document life in the rural South. Here, two boys outside a country store hoist watermelons onto their shoulders. Behind them, two adults stand in the shade of the store, their silhouettes visible through the open door that leads straight through to the barn on the other side. These frank, unadorned images of life in the rural south were revelations for American cultural audiences accustomed to cities, including writer and art connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein, who wrote: "The power of Evans's work lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses, and streets.

No politics whatever. While Evans was on leave from his job for the FSA during the summer of , Fortune magazine commissioned him to collaborate with writer James Agee on a piece that focused on impoverished sharecropping families from Alabama. Fortune never published the material that ensued from this commission, but it resulted in some of Evans's most iconic works.

Deemed by the New York Public Library to be one of the most influential books of the last century, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men scrutinized a culture's character and captured the cadence of its ordinary people. Refusing to dramatize poverty, this series of unlabeled photographs captured the Great Depression as stark, truthful tragedy.

The faces, towns, rooms, and clothes of impoverished famers distilled the hardship being felt all over the country. Evans made several photographs of Mrs. Burroughs, each slightly different from the others but all bound by a characteristically clean composition and penchant for visual clarity. The weathered wall behind her, with its evocative horizontal lines, anticipates the abstraction of future photographers like Aaron Siskind and Frederick Sommer.

These straight lines underscore the flatness of her unsmiling, prematurely aged features, and her expression - head slightly tilted, brows slightly furrowed, mouth slightly downturned - holds us captive precisely because it is so difficult to read. As opposed to an allegory of suffering and privation, Burroughs is an individual. With a 35 mm Contax camera fastened to his chest and a rigged cable release in his hand, Evans captured scores of people deep in conversation, immersed in their reading, or lost in thought.

Unaware of the camera, their attitudes and expressions reflect the subway's unwritten code for human behavior, a mixture of anonymity and intimacy. They also bring forward the personalities of individuals. Here, a well-dressed man leans forward anxiously is he late for something? To his right, we see the hand of another commuter grasping the newspaper.

The tension in their poses is essential for maintaining balance on the train, but it also conveys the constant stress of the urban environment. Using a concealed camera and riding the subway, a technically tricky endeavor, meant Evans too was unrelaxed and had to relinquish traditional types of control photographers usually exert over their shots.

Although the setting was public, he found that his subjects, unposed and lost in their own thoughts, displayed a constantly shifting medley of moods and expressions—by turns curious, bored, amused, despondent, dreamy, and dyspeptic. Between and , Evans contributed more than photographs to 45 articles published in Fortune magazine.

He worked at the luxe magazine as Special Photographic Editor from to and not only conceived of the portfolios, executed the photographs, and designed the page layouts, but also wrote the accompanying texts. His topics were executed with both black-and-white and color materials and included railroad company insignias, common tools, old summer resort hotels, and views of America from the train window.

Using the standard journalistic picture-story format, Evans combined his interest in words and pictures and created a multidisciplinary narrative of unusually high quality. In , Evans began to work with the innovative Polaroid SX camera and an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer. The virtues of the camera fit perfectly with his search for a concise yet poetic vision of the world: its instant prints were, for the infirm seventy-year-old photographer, what scissors and cut paper were for the aging Matisse.

With the new camera, Evans returned to several of his enduring themes—among the most important of which are signs, posters, and their ultimate reduction, the letter forms themselves. Department of Photographs.

Visiting The Met? With exceptional skills at photography he started teaching at the Yale University School of Art. Besides this his keen interest in reading and writing earned him the title of a staff writer at Time magazine, in Taking his creativity ahead, ha also converted to editor at Fortune magazine through He shot a long series with the then-new Polaroid SX camera, in and , after which his old age and fragile health made it impossible to work anymore.

Life could spare Evans only till as death embraced him in his house at Lyme, Connecticut. However, the world still recognizes his efforts and that is why in , Evans was inducted to the St. Learn More. Biography Walker Evans is one of the leading photographers in the history of American documentary photography. Born in St. Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration from to , during which time he made many of the photographs for Walker Evans: American Photographs, an exhibition and publication organized by the Museum of Modern Art in In he took a leave from the FSA in order to document the living conditions of Alabama sharecropper families as part of a collaborative project with writer James Agee.

Another of Evans's many photographic series was Many Are Called, comprised of images taken in the New York City subway system using a hidden camera between and Between and , he worked as a staff photographer for Time and Fortune. After retiring from professional photography in , he taught graphic arts at Yale.