Walker Evans: The Architect of American Documentary Photography

 

Walker Evans saw America in a way few others did. He was not just a photographer but a free spirited artist, capturing the rawness of America thought its streets and storefronts, farmers and factory workers, and beaten-down portraits of friends and strangers.

The son of a privileged Midwestern family, Evans, born on November 3, 1903, in St. Louis, Missouri, found his calling in the harsh realities of the Depression Era, creating a photographic documentary of a country grappling with hardship.

His notable works include American Photographs (1936), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), and Many Called (1996). Many of his works are held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the George Eastman Museum.

An Eye for the Overlooked.

What set Evans apart was his instinct for capturing the overlooked. He created artworks from the geometry of street signage, Gas Stations, Garden Gnomes, Window and House Frames. His work with writer James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men remains a cornerstone of documentary photography, on the lives of Tenant Farmers during the Great Depression. The project was initiated by Fortune Magazine.

The SX-70 Kodak camera allowed Walker to turn the overlooked into something everybody looked at. The camera’s straightforwardness allowed Walker to focus on the image rather than fine-tune camera settings. With a burst of light, giving off a buzz that sounded like a mechanical bee, the camera ejected prints one after another each time he pressed the button.

A Reluctant Government Photographer

By the mid-1930s, Evans had taken a position with the Resettlement Administration (RA), later absorbed into the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The job came with a travel stipend and the opportunity to work with the best equipment available. Evans purchased a Deardorff large-format camera and a Leica 35mm. He charged the government with the bill and hit the road. By June 1931, he had left New York for Reedville, West Virginia, his lens ready to capture a nation.

The RA assignment was monumental. It aimed to build, frame by frame, a composite portrait of America’s working class and how they lived in different parts of the country. Each photographer was treated like a construction worker when creating the photo base. Instead of brick and cement, his or her duty was to capture images across race, class and geography. The goal was to create a visual encyclopedia of the American experience.

By 1941, the FSA’s archive had swelled to over 250,000 photographs, a sprawling mosaic of faces, towns, and landscapes captured just before the country was pulled into the Pacific war.

Evans, ever independent, revolted at the bureaucratic nature of government work. He loathed being treated as a mere “photographer for hire,” a sentiment solidified when Lincoln Kirstein, his boss, attempted to dictate which Victorian houses to photograph and how to do it. Although a Columbia University economics graduate, Evans viewed his boss as a glorified shoe salesman. The struggle between commercial obligations and artistic independence was Evan’s lifelong struggle.

Cuba and the Hemingway Connection

In 1933, Evans travelled to Cuba on assignment for the publisher J.B Lippincott & Co. tasked with photographing the unrest under dictator Gerardo Machado. His works were featured in The Crime of Cuba (1933), a book by journalist Carleton Beals that exposed the brutality of Machado’s regime.

While in Havana, Evans met Hemingway. Their union was formative. Rumours have it that Evans spent many nights with the writer drinking and that Hemingway lent him money to extend his stay.

When it was time to leave the shores of Cuba. Evans was concerned that Cuban authorities might confiscate his negatives, he left 46 prints with Hemingway before returning to the U.S.A. in 2002. This forgotten cache was rediscovered in Havana and later exhibited in Key West. The exhibition offered a fresh glimpse into Evans’ documentary record of Havana’s turmoil, featuring beggars, dockworkers, military presence and daily life under dictatorship. These images are now considered some of his most important early work.

 

The Eye That Saw America

By the fall of 1974, Evans’ health was failing. He had resumed smoking and drinking. He revolved between a hospital, a psychiatric ward, and a rehab centre. The doctors, having not much hope, sent him back home, to his apartment in New Haven.

Against the advice of friends, he attended a speaking engagement at Radcliffe. Walker was very fail, yet he handled the assignment with ease. He then returned home, asked for a cup of tea and lit up a cigarette. He started speaking of future projects—portraits in England, a talk at Yale on snapshots. Then, suddenly, as per his friend Ginni Hubbard, he collapsed. Evans was gone.

Walker’s influence extended beyond his images. In 1967, he did a review of Ginni Hubbard’s Bed photograph. Evans wrote:

“To bring the lyrical into the documentary—consistently—is an achievement one wants to see. Ginni Hubbard, one of the younger photographers, can do this. Her remarkably uncontrived work is at once diffident and ardent, muted and intense; and in a field where femininity can be very bad, her photography is distinctly feminine in a good sense. The quiet print here reproduced is an example of her quality, combining purity and savoir-faire. She begins, at last, it seems, to take the documentary style where it ought to go. Ginni Hubbard will be called a poet by those whose eyes are open to the kind of magic her pictures embody and sometimes flash.” – Source Walker Evans – Last Photographs and Life Stories.

That magic, the ability to elevate the overlooked, was Evans’s lifelong pursuit. He carried his SX-70 camera everywhere with him – the requirement for taking pictures; was similar to wanting Oxygen to breathe.

Even now, decades after his death, Evans’ images remain essential. They remind us that the grandest stories are often the quietest and that truth can be found in a billboard, a diner, or a face in the crowd. He saw America and, in doing so, helped America see itself.