Walker Evans

The definitive biography of Walker Evans (1903-1975), one of the great American photographers of the twentieth century, is full of rare photographs and written by one of America’s most esteemed biographers
The Depression Era photographs of Alabama sharecroppers by Walker More…

Evans remain among the most indelible and iconic images in the American consciousness. Indeed, the entire oeuvre of this great photographer is one of the most influential bodies of photographic work in this century.
As James R. Mellow’s landmark biography makes clear, however, Walker Evans was not the propagandist for social causes he was presumed to be. He was, instead, a fastidious observer of the true nature of things or, as he himself has said, of things as they are. His instinctive aversion to artifice set him apart from the formalism of his photographic predecessor, Alfred Stieglitz, as well as from his immediate contemporary, Ansel Adams. Evans’s commitment, rather, lay in documenting the dusty particulars of American life, the back roads, the run-down mill towns, the roadside stands, and torn movie posters. He developed a distinctive vernacular that made his photographs immediately recognizable, and influenced countless other photographers, including Robert Frank and Dorothea Lange.

With unrestricted access to all of Evans’s diaries, letters, work logs and contact sheets, as well as the diaries of Lincoln Kirstein, Mellow has produced not just a definitive biography of a major American artist but a fascinating cultural history of the period.