AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Plain, direct pictures of America in the 1930s; the Alabama farm families of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; secret portraits in the New York subway
- Worked in
- Black and white; small color Polaroids in his last years
- Camera
- 8x10 view camera; a hidden 35mm Contax in the subway; Polaroid SX-70 at the end
- Also
- First single-photographer show at the Museum of Modern Art (1938); editor at Fortune until 1965; professor at Yale from 1965
- Start with
- American Photographs (Museum of Modern Art, 1938)
Walker Evans (1903–1975) was an American photographer known for clear, direct pictures of American life during the Great Depression. His photographs of three farm families in Alabama appeared in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), made with the writer James Agee. In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art in New York gave him its first exhibition devoted to a single photographer.
The story
In August 1936, Walker Evans put his camera in front of the back wall of a small wooden cabin in Hale County, Alabama. Allie Mae Burroughs, a farmer’s wife of 27, stood against the boards. He made four pictures of her. From one frame to the next, her face changes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the range as going from cooperative to resentful.
Evans was not there for the government that summer. Fortune magazine had asked the writer James Agee to report on cotton farmers in the Deep South, and Agee wanted Evans as his photographer. So Evans took leave from his job at the Farm Security Administration. At the courthouse in Greensboro, the two men met three farmers, and Evans started photographing that same day. Their families, headed by Bud Fields, Floyd Burroughs and Frank Tingle, became the heart of the work.
Over several weeks, most of the pictures were made in and around the four-room cabin of Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs. The family did not own it. They leased the house, the land, the mule and the tools, and owed half their cotton and corn at harvest.
But Fortune never ran the story. Therefore Evans had to decide for himself which Allie Mae people would see. For American Photographs, his 1938 show and book at the Museum of Modern Art, he picked the frame where she looks most content. For Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the 1941 book with Agee, he chose a harder one. Her lips are pressed together and her eyes hold the lens. Early reviewers saw it as the defining image of the book.
Only about 600 copies sold at first. A new edition in 1960, with 62 of his photographs instead of 31, finally brought the pictures to a wide audience.
Decades later, in a 1972 class at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, Evans talked about that guarded portrait again. “That face immediately is very American, very expressive of beautiful and noble character,” he said. “There’s a directness and simplicity. I find it beautiful. It has grown on me.”
The work
- 1903Born in St. Louis, Missouri
- 1928Takes up photography
- 1933Photographs Havana for Carleton Beals’s book The Crime of Cuba
- 1935Joins the Resettlement Administration, later the Farm Security Administration
- 1936Spends the summer in Hale County, Alabama, with James Agee
- 1938American Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art; starts the subway portraits
- 1941Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is published
- 1973Returns to Hale County with a Polaroid SX-70
- 1975Dies in New Haven, Connecticut
Lessons
Make more than one frame. Evans made four pictures of Allie Mae Burroughs in the same spot. Each one showed a different face.
Choosing is part of the work. He used one frame of her for American Photographs and another for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The choice changed the story.
Stare. Look hard and long. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop was his credo.
Try this: photograph one person four times in the same place, against a plain wall, from the same distance. Do not tell them what face to make. Later, pick one frame for a family album and one for a serious story, and see how the choice changes the person.
Gear
Evans picked a different camera for each kind of work.
8x10 view camera: most of his New Deal photographs in the 1930s were made with this large camera.
35mm Contax: for the subway portraits he strapped this small camera to his chest under his coat, so people did not see it.
Polaroid SX-70: in 1973 and 1974 he used this instant camera for his last work. Polaroid gave him all the film he wanted. He took it back to Hale County in 1973 with the artist William Christenberry.
He rarely made his own prints in the darkroom. He guided the printing, sometimes only with handwritten notes on the negatives.
Books
American Photographs (Museum of Modern Art, 1938; 75th anniversary edition 2012). Published with his 1938 exhibition, the first at the museum devoted to a single photographer. It has 87 photographs and an essay by his friend Lincoln Kirstein. The 2012 edition, 208 pages, recreates the original book as closely as possible with new printing technology. Start here if you want to see how Evans looked at America in the 1930s, from signs and buildings to faces.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1941). Subtitled Three Tenant Families. The long text by James Agee follows 31 full-page photographs by Evans from Hale County, Alabama, made in the summer of 1936 for a Fortune story that never ran. Only about 600 copies sold at first. The 1960 edition doubled the photographs to 62 and brought the book a new audience. A classic of both photography and American writing, for readers who want the whole story of that summer.
Many Are Called (Houghton Mifflin, 1966). The portraits Evans made in secret on the New York subway between 1938 and 1941, kept unpublished for about 25 years. The book has 89 photographs and an introduction James Agee wrote in 1940. The last plate is a blind accordion player in a subway car, the picture in our gallery. A good book for street and portrait photographers who want to see one idea followed for years.
Walker Evans (Princeton University Press and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000). By Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund and Mia Fineman. Made for the Met’s 2000 retrospective, which showed more than 175 photographs and material from the Walker Evans Archive. The Met has held his estate since 1994. A broad survey of his whole career, for readers who want more than one series.
In his words
“I was damn well going to be an artist and I wasn't going to be a businessman.”
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