Steidlville

Walker Evans

Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and was raised in Kenilworth, Illinois. He attended the Loomis School, Phillips Academy, and Williams College. After a short time working at the New York Public Library, he traveled to Paris, where he audited courses at the Sorbonne and immersed himself in the writings of Flaubert and Baudelaire. He returned to New York in 1927 and began to photograph seriously the following year. His photographs were used to illustrate an edition of his friend Hart Crane's The Bridge in 1930. The same year, at the suggestion of Lincoln Kirstein, he began to document early Victorian houses in New England and New York. These photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1933. Kirstein and Evans collaborated on three books in the following years, and many early Evans images were published in Kirstein's journal Hound & Horn.
Evans's first exhibition was held at the Julien Levy Gallery in 1932. That same year he provided illustrations for Carleton Beals's book The Crime of Cuba. In 1935 Evans made photographs of African art exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art for distribution to colleges and libraries by the General Education Board.
During the Great Depression, Evans began to photograph for the Resettlement Administration, later known as the Farm Security Administration (FSA), documenting workers and architecture in the Southeastern states. In 1936 he traveled with the writer James Agee to illustrate an article on tenant farm families for Fortune magazine; the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men came out of this collaboration.
Throughout his career Evans contributed photographs to numerous publications, including three devoted solely to his work. In 1965 he left Fortune, where he had been a staff photographer for twenty years, to become a professor of photography and graphic design at Yale University. He remained in the position until 1974, a year before his death.
During his lifetime Evans was the recipient of many awards. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1940 and received an honorary degree from Williams College in 1968. His photographs were exhibited all over the world, including several major shows at the Museum of Modern Art.