Photographers

Photographer

Walker Evans

Biography

Walker Evans (1903–1975) was an American photographer whose documentary work profoundly shaped the development of twentieth‑century photography. Born in St. Louis and later active across the United States, Evans became widely known for his work with the Farm Security Administration (1935–1937), where he created unvarnished images capturing the realities of rural American life during the Great Depression. His collaboration with writer James Agee resulted in the landmark 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evans’s precise, direct style established a new standard for documentary clarity and influenced generations of artists, from Robert Frank to Diane Arbus. Over his long career he worked for Time and Fortune, exhibited at leading museums including MoMA, and later taught at Yale University.

Photobook Library editorial summary · AI-assisted Independent summary

Photobooks

7 photobooks

Selected Works & Key Projects

A source-backed introduction to individual photographs and significant bodies of work.

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Selected photographs

1936 · Hale County, Alabama, United States

Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife

This 1936 gelatin silver print portrays Allie Mae Burroughs, whose family lived in a four-room cabin and leased its home, land, mule, and farm tools. Evans made four related portraits of her against the cabin’s rear wall, each registering a different expression. He selected another negative for American Photographs, but this more guarded portrait was reproduced in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and was identified by early reviewers as that book’s quintessential image. It merits selection for concentrating the Alabama project’s social history and its difficult, psychologically ambiguous encounter between sitter and camera.

Work source ↗

1936 · Hale County, Alabama, United States

Alabama Tenant Farmer

Alabama Tenant Farmer is a 1936 gelatin silver portrait of Floyd Burroughs, a cotton farmer and the patriarch of the Burroughs family. The Metropolitan Museum of Art identifies it as one of the masterpieces of Evans’s collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evans and Agee spent several weeks with three tenant-farmer families, observing their lives and daily activities. This image merits selection because it joins that larger study’s account of the Great Depression with an intimate individual portrait, making the social subject inseparable from a particular person.

Work source ↗

1936 · Hale County, Alabama, United States

Floyd and Lucille Burroughs on Porch, Hale County, Alabama

Made in 1936, this portrait shows Floyd Burroughs with his daughter Lucille on the porch. Fortune magazine had commissioned Evans and James Agee to investigate the circumstances of tenant farmers in the South; their unpublished article subsequently became Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. The Metropolitan Museum of Art calls the picture a superb example of the dignity and austere beauty Evans found in ordinary lives, and notes its balance between family tradition and wider agrarian concerns. It merits selection because it gives the Alabama undertaking a familial, intergenerational form.

Work source ↗

1936 · Savannah, Georgia, United States

Penny Picture Display, Savannah

Evans photographed this Savannah studio window in 1936, where a one-cent portrait service displayed its favored examples in a strict grid. MoMA counts 225 portrait spaces in the display, with more than one hundred different men, women, and children represented. The museum connects the photograph to Evans’s interest in the directness of useful vernacular pictures and describes its crisp, planar, self-contained construction. It merits selection because the picture makes a commercial display into a portrait of a community and a precise statement of Evans’s allegiance to everyday photographic culture.

Work source ↗

1938 · New York City, United States

Subway Portrait

This gelatin silver print, dated 1938–41, is one example from Evans’s subway work. MoMA records that he brought a concealed camera into the New York subway, with its lens peering through his coat buttons, to photograph fellow passengers. The museum also notes that he made such pictures while riding with Helen Levitt; the subjects are shown reading or absorbed in thought. This photograph merits selection as an accessible single work from the larger series because it preserves the project’s defining condition: an unposed encounter within the compressed public space of a subway car.

Work source ↗

Career timeline

12
  1. November 3, 1903
  2. September 1922–June 1923
  3. 1926

    Education

    Literary study and early snapshots in Paris

    In Paris, Evans attended literary lectures at the Sorbonne, took his first snapshots with a Kodak Vest Pocket camera, and worked in Nadar’s former studio. The convergence of literary study and camera use is a significant early step toward his photographic practice.

    Source: Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans | Object:Photo Verified Sep 5, 2026

  4. 1930

    Career milestone

    First photographs published; first solo exhibition

    Three of Evans’s Brooklyn Bridge photographs illustrated Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge. In the same year, he had his first solo exhibition at the Harvard Society of Contemporary Arts. Together, these documented events marked his early public emergence as a photographer.

    Source: Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans | Object:Photo Verified Sep 5, 2026

  5. 1933

    Exhibition

    Photographs of 19th Century Houses at MoMA

    Evans participated in Walker Evans: Photographs of 19th Century Houses at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA identifies it as the institution’s first monographic photography exhibition, making it an important institutional recognition early in Evans’s career.

    Source: Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans | Object:Photo Verified Sep 5, 2026

  6. 1935–1937

    Career milestone

    Works for the Farm Security Administration

    Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration from 1935 to 1937. During this period, he made many photographs later included in the 1938 MoMA exhibition and publication Walker Evans: American Photographs, linking federal documentary work to a defining presentation of his art.

    Source: International Center of Photography, Walker Evans Verified Sep 5, 2026

  7. July–August 1936

    Series

    Documents Alabama sharecropper families with James Agee

    Evans photographed sharecropper families in Alabama for a collaborative Fortune magazine reportage project with writer James Agee. The work later became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, establishing a major connection between Evans’s photography and Agee’s writing.

    Source: Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans | Object:Photo Verified Sep 5, 2026

  8. September 28–November 18, 1938

    Exhibition

    Walker Evans: American Photographs at MoMA

    MoMA presented Walker Evans: American Photographs from September 28 through November 18, 1938. The exhibition was the museum’s first one-person photography show and was accompanied by American Photographs, a book first published that year to accompany the exhibition.

    Source: Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans: American Photographs Verified Sep 5, 2026

  9. 1941

    Photobook

    Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is published

    The Alabama sharecropper project made with James Agee was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. The publication paired Agee’s text with Evans’s photographs and preserved their collaborative record of Depression-era living conditions.

    Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Verified Sep 5, 2026

  10. 1945–1965

    Career milestone

    Special Photographic Editor at Fortune

    Evans served as Special Photographic Editor at Fortune from 1945 to 1965. He conceived portfolios, made photographs, designed page layouts, and wrote accompanying texts; the Metropolitan Museum of Art records that he contributed more than 400 photographs to 45 Fortune articles between 1934 and 1965.

    Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans (1903–1975) Verified Sep 5, 2026

  11. 1965

    Career milestone

    Accepts a professorship at Yale

    After his Fortune staff-photographer years, Evans accepted a professorship at Yale in 1965. This marks his documented transition from a long editorial career into university teaching.

    Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans Verified Sep 5, 2026

  12. 1973

    Series

    Begins working with the Polaroid SX-70

    Evans began working with the Polaroid SX-70 camera in 1973. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the resulting unique SX-70 prints as his final photographs and notes his return to recurring subjects including signs, posters, and letter forms.

    Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans (1903–1975) Verified Sep 5, 2026

Collections & representation

Archive

Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art preserves prints, negatives, and personal papers, serving as the primary research repository for the photographer's life and work.

Verified 2026-09-05Wikipedia

Collection

Library of Congress

The Library of Congress holds Evans's Farm Security Administration photographs, including his iconic images of Depression-era rural America, accessible through the FSA/OWI collection.

Verified 2026-09-05Wikipedia

Publishing relationship

Fortune

Evans served as a staff photographer at Fortune magazine from 1945 to 1965, contributing many editorial photo features over two decades.

Verified 2026-09-05Wikipedia

Articles & news

2

Other · San Francisco Museum of Modern Art · Lindsey Westbrook

Walker Evans: Photographer and Collector (opens a new site)

This SFMOMA article considers collecting as integral to Evans’s practice. Drawing on comments by Clément Chéroux, it describes his interests in postcards, graphic ephemera, signs, tools, and display, and relates those collections to photographs such as roadside stores and garages. It is useful for understanding vernacular material culture as both his subject and research resource.

Other · San Francisco Museum of Modern Art · Clément Chéroux

The Art of the Oxymoron: The Vernacular Style of Walker Evans (opens a new site)

Curator Clément Chéroux’s SFMOMA essay examines Evans through the idea of the American vernacular. It uses a composite subway image to discuss his disruption of photographic time, then argues for a thematic reading across signs, shop windows, and other recurring subjects rather than a strictly chronological account of his work.

Videos

1

Other · Centre Pompidou · 3:00

Exposition Walker Evans (opens a new site)

A three-minute Centre Pompidou video presented by exhibition curator Clément Chéroux for the institution’s 2017 Evans retrospective. The museum frames the presentation around Evans’s 1930s photographs of America in crisis, his Fortune projects of the 1940s and 1950s, and the influence of his documentary style on later photographers and artists.

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