26 Facts About Walker Evans

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression.

Walker Evans said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".

Walker Evans was born in St Louis, Missouri to Jessie and Walker Evans.

Walker Evans was raised in an affluent environment; he spent his youth in Toledo, Ohio, Chicago, and New York City.

Walker Evans attended the Loomis Institute and Mercersburg Academy, then graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts in 1922.

Walker Evans studied French literature for a year at Williams College, spending much of his time in the school's library before dropping out.

Walker Evans returned to New York City and worked as a night attendant in the map room of the Public Library.

Walker Evans was a clerk for a stockbroker firm on Wall Street from 1927 to 1929.

Walker Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York.

In May and June 1933, Walker Evans took photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals' The Crime of Cuba, a "strident account" of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado.

Walker Evans's photographs documented street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes.

Walker Evans helped Hemingway acquire photos from newspaper archives that documented some of the political violence Hemingway described in To Have and Have Not.

Walker Evans had no difficulties when returning to the United States, and 31 of his photos appeared in Beals' book.

In 1935, Walker Evans spent two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania.

Walker Evans quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an "information specialist" in the Resettlement Administration, a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture.

In 1936, Walker Evans, employed by the National Recovery Administration photographed three impoverished sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama.

The catalogue included an accompanying essay by Lincoln Kirstein, who Walker Evans befriended in his early days in New York.

In 1938, Walker Evans took his first photographs in the New York City Subway with a camera hidden in his coat.

In 1938 and 1939, Walker Evans worked with and mentored Helen Levitt.

Walker Evans loosely supervised the making of prints of most of his photographs, sometimes only attaching handwritten notes to negatives with instructions on some aspect of the printing procedure.

Between 1940 and 1959, Walker Evans was awarded three Guggenheim Fellowships in Photography to continue his work of making record photographs of contemporary American subjects.

Walker Evans was a passionate reader and writer, and in 1945 became a staff writer at Time.

In 1973 and 1974, Walker Evans used the new Polaroid SX-70 instant camera for his last work; the company provided him with an unlimited supply of film, and the camera's simplicity and speed were easier for the aged photographer.

Walker Evans died at his apartment in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975.

In 1994, the estate of Walker Evans handed over its holdings to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 2000, Walker Evans was inducted into the St Louis Walk of Fame.