Biography

Walker Evans was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art, New York held their first exhibition devoted to the work of a single photographer, Walker Evans: American Photographs. In 1941, Evans's photographs and James Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. in 1945, Evans became a staff writer at Time magazine. Shortly afterward he became an editor at Fortune magazine, where he worked through 1965. That year, he began teaching at the Yale University School of Art. 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.