Fine Art Photography
Series
Walker Evans
Biography of American Photographer.
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Fine Art Photography
Series
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CAMERA DEVELOPMENT |
Walker Evans (1903-75)Contents • Walker Evans's
Photography |
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CAMERA ART GLOSSARY
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One of the greatest photographers of the 1930s, the American camera artist Walker Evans reinvented the photographic documentary, endowing it with an aesthetic that gave it a new sophistication. A photo chronicler of American everyday culture after 1930, he mastered the straight documentary style and made the banal beautiful. Undoubtedly, his most famous contribution to American Art was for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), during the Great Depression, when he photographed the effects of the economic downturn on ordinary people. His masterpiece is probably Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (1936, silver print, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), a portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, which first appeared in his book Let us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), produced in collaboration with James Agee, when on assignment in Hale County, Alabama, for Fortune Magazine. It was taken the same year that Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) produced her similar and equally famous photo Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. [Please see also: Ben Shahn (1898-1969) and the Social Realism movement.] Another well known photograph by Evans, is Penny Picture Display, Savannah, Georgia (1936, Museum of Modern Art, New York). In this composition of a window display of a local photographer's studio, Evans endows the anonymously democratic community of subjects, with an enduring sense of history. His elegant crystal-clear photography influenced a wide range of camera artists, including Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, as well as Bernd and Hilla Becher, the influential founders of the Dusseldorf School. The progenitor of the documentary in American photography, Evans had the exceptional ability to see the present as if it were already the past and to translate that vision into enduring art. His main subject was the vernacular - the portrayal of people found in roadside stands, cheap cafes, simple hallways, and small town streets. For five decades, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans pictorialized the American scene, creating a catalogue of modern America in the making. Important Picture: "Portrait of a Sharecropping Familiy
in Alabama" (1936) Youth in Toledo (Ohio), Chicago, and New York. Studies literature at Williams College. Various casual jobs in New York. 1926, moves to Paris with the aim of becoming a writer. Contact with circle around Sylvia Beach (including James Joyce). 1927, returns to New York. To 1929, works for a firm of stockbrokers. Friendship with Lincoln Kirstein. First photos with a small roll-film camera. Three photos in a volume of poetry The Bridge his first publication. Discovers the oeuvre of the French documentary photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927). 1931, series on Victorian villas in the south. 1933, in Havana: photos for the book The Crime of Cuba. For the Museum of Modern Art, photo documentation of the exhibition African Negro Art. Like his younger contemporary, Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), Evans spent little time making prints in the darkroom and he showed little inclination to supervise the actual technical production of his photographs. 1935-1937, works as photographer for the Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA). 1936, reportage on small farmers in Alabama with the writer James Agee for Fortune (published joint book: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941). 1938: American Photographs Museum of Modern Art's first monographed exhibition. First photographs in the subway.
1945-1965, photo editor, photographer for Fortune. American industrial landscapes (around 1950). 1965-1974, professor at Yale School of Art and Architecture. Exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1971, curated by John Szarkowski) his last big show during his lifetime. 2000, major retrospective in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, with complementary exhibition project in Museum of Modern Art: "Walker Evans & Company".
Unless stated all shows are solo events. 1931 New York (John Becker Gallery) In 1994, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC) acquired the copyright for all works of art in all media by Walker Evans, with the exception of his RA/FSA works held in the collection of the Library of Congress. Photographs by Walker Evans are regularly exhibited in some of the best galleries of contemporary art across America. |
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Profiles of Other Famous Camera Artists In addition to those photographers mentioned above, here is a short list of the best known camera artists of the 19th/20th century. • 19th-Century
Photographers (1800-1900). |
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• For more about documentary-style
photography, see: Homepage.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ART |
