Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born on November 3, 1903, in St. Louis Missouri. After dropping out of the Williams College and working dead-end jobs in New York City, he moved to Paris in 1926, with financial support from his father. While in Paris, Evans audited classes at the Sorbonne and made some casual snapshots. Evans returned to New York a year later and published his first images in 1930. Evans is most recognized for his work during the Great Depression when he began working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), in which he documented workers and architecture in Southeastern U.S. In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, published American Photographs to accompany a retrospective exhibition of Evans’s work at that time. In 1943, Evans was hired by Time where he spent the next 22 years as a staff photographer, working closely with Fortune magazine. He then took a position at Yale University as professor of photography and graphic design until 1974. He died in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975.

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Walker Evans is featured in Edition: The Best of the Met