Photographer of the Week - Walker Evans

 As part of my Journalism class we are required to create a report on a photographer of our choice. For this project I chose Walker Evans, a semi-abstract photographer turned historical storyteller. Starting off in the early 30s as a solo artist, he lived in New York and had a knack for capturing the everyday life within the city. The idea that he should be asked to make a photograph conceived by someone else was offensive to his ego; in addition, there were many sorts of photographs that he had never learned to make.

 From mid-1935 to early 1937 Evans worked for a regular salary as a member of the so-called “historical unit” of the Farm Security Administration (FSA; earlier, the Resettlement Administration), an agency of the Department of Agriculture, ran by Roy E. Striker. In any case it afforded Evans the means of traveling, generally alone and without immediate financial concerns, in search of the material for his art.

During the late summer of 1936 Evans was on leave from the FSA to work for Fortune magazine with writer James Agee on a study of three sharecropping families from Hale county, Alabama. The project never appeared in Fortune. Only after a few years in 1941 were his photos shown to the world through the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.


Personally I found this picture of Allie Mae Burroughs to be his claim to fame but there are a huge amount of photos that he contributed over the years to FSA. This photo, also known as the Tenant Farmer's Wife, takes on a sort of Mona Lisa feeling where you can't quite tell what she's thinking or her feelings at the time. This is where I believe his sort of abstract eye for photography truly manifested.


Hale County, Alabama 1936

For more: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/evan/hd_evan.htm


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