Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1903. His aim, in his words, was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent". He is best known for his work which documents the effects of the Great Depression. Like other photographers, Evans loosely supervised the making of prints and rarely spent time in the darkroom making them from his own negatives. Another well known piece of work is the book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men", which told of his stay with three white tenant families in Alabama, during the Great Depression. While Evans provided photographs of sharecroppers, James Agee, a writer, provided the words for the book, which was an account of rural poverty. T he individuals photographed became icons of the "Depression-era" (some of the descendants stated that "the family was presented in a falsely unflattering light by Evans' photographs"). It was also suggested that Evans may have been the inspiration for Andy Warhol's photo booth portraits. Evans experimented with photo booth self portraits himself in 1929. Many of Evans' work are kept as part of permanent collections in museums, and institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art