Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and raised in a suburb of Chicago and Toledo, Ohio. Educated at Andover and Williams College, Walker Evans became a fan of the avant-garde literature of James Joyce and T.S. Eliot, and French modernists Flaubert and Baudelaire. After a taste of the bohemian art scene in the streets and cafés of Paris, he came to New York in the late 1920s with the intention of becoming a writer. He became a photographer instead.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers this description of his early work:

...Supporting himself with odd jobs, he taught himself to use the camera as a writer would a pen—to inscribe the meaning of what he saw around him. His early photographic projects, some commissioned, some self-motivated, examined aspects of contemporary American life and its environment-the streets of New York, Victorian architecture in New England, the Brooklyn Bridge. He made abstract compositions of electric signs, sidewalk displays, and shadows cast by elevated train platforms, and documented the city with the combined interest of the historian and the anthropologist. Walker Evans found in these subjects an authentic expression of what was most American about America, and his lasting achievement was to express that sense of indigenous national character in his photographs. He wanted his work, as he once said, to be "literate, authoritative, transcendent."

This might seem an odd ambition for a man considered by many as the most realistic of American photographers. Indeed, in notes written in 1934 and 1935, while he was helping Roy Stryker set up the FSA's photography project, Evans called for images that were "pure record not propaganda." Writing about Walker Evans's photographs for the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, critic John Szarkowski described them as "poetic uses of bare-faced facts, facts presented with such fastidious reserve that the quality of the picture seemed identical to that of the subject."

"Fastidious" is a good choice of words. Evans clearly wanted to be thought of as an artist, not a propagandist. There is something very avant-garde in the almost perversely jaded detachment of his camera. His photographs are not objective. What they do is carefully craft an illusion of objectivity by working against any inherent tendency to editorialize. Walker Evans's photographs never seemed posed. His negatives reveal that he was constantly on the move, seldom taking more than two exposures from the same angle. Yet such was his sense of composition, that the results often seem like carefully planned architectural studies or meticulous landscapes into which people have somehow intruded.

All photographs are frozen moments in time, but Evans's images seem even more temporal. They are self-consciously non-iconographic, stubbornly refusing to represent anything but themselves. He also has a gift for always incorporating the fleeting and ephemeral, be it a wall calendar, or an advertisement, or an expression. His people are so clearly mortal that they are, in some very real sense, already dead. Most importantly, Walter Evans's photographs are always cryptic, unwilling to be reduced to a simple message.

Evans sole venture into Arkansas was photographing refugees of the 1937 flood at Forrest City, Arkansas. Please note that the digital files available for the Walter Evans photographs are of lower quality than those for the rest of this exhibit.

Learn about other Arkansas photographers, such as Carl Mydans and Edwin Locke.