Decade by Decade
By Walker Evans
2010
First Published
3.72
Average Rating
264
Number of Pages
Walker Evans (1903-1975) is, without doubt, one of the most influential American photographers ever, and many of his images have become fixed in the collective memory. But while Evans' uncompromising depiction of poverty during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the subject of a series commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, has become a key chapter in the history of photography, his equally innovative images from later decades have generally commanded less attention. This exciting new monograph attempts to redress the balance by examining Evans' complete body of work, and features many rarely seen photographs, including his final works, a sequence of Polaroids shot in the early 1970s (a sequence made possible by an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer). Evans' re-ascendancy in the 1970s, and his close relationship with legendary Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski, are also closely examined, in this essential and definitive volume on a great photographer who certainly achieved his aim to produce pictures that were "literate, authoritative, transcendent."Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans (1903-1975) took up photography in 1928. His book collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which portrayed the lives of three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Depression, has become one of that era's most defining documents. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945, and shortly after moved to Fortune magazine, where he stayed until 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art. Evans died at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975.
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Author
Walker Evans
Author · 14 books
Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as The Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House. In 2000, Evans was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame
