Birthday: “Fine photography is literature, and it should be.”

Self-portrait, late 1930s

Walker Evans III (1903-1975)

Photographer, writer

His dad was a successful midwestern ad man, whose job meant moving to where his big accounts were. Young Walker bounced through a series of private schools, then two years at Phillips Academy. At Williams College he studied French literature mostly by reading in the library rather than attending classes, and he dropped out in 1926.

Evans wanted to be a writer, so he went to Paris to hang out with writers. His shyness prevented him from getting to know any, though, other than a chance encounter with Joyce at Shakespeare & Co. He didn’t do much writing, either: he wanted to be one so badly, he froze at the prospect of putting pen to paper.

So he went home, and worked as a stockbroker’s clerk. He fell in with some of the Greenwich Village crowd: John Cheever, Hart Crane, Lincoln Kirstein, Ben Shahn. He got interested in photography in 1928, and won some fame when his friend Crane chose three Evans pictures for his book, The Bridge.

The connections with another friend, Lincoln Kirstein, got him a gig to photograph New England Victorian homes in 1931. When the Depression came on, Evans got work with the Federal Resettlement Administration, then the Farm Security Administration. He met a writer called James Agee, and in 1936 Fortune magazine- which was new on the stands and trying to meld art and commerce- commissioned them to do a piece on the farming poor.

FSA gave them a leave of absence on condition the photos that resulted would be government property, and the two men spent several weeks living with three tenant farm families in Hale County, Alabama. The Writer’s Almanac reports, ‘At first, he was uncomfortable with the idea of taking pictures of such desperate people, but James Agee persuaded him that their job was show how noble these people were despite their circumstances. When Evans and Agee said goodbye at the end of their work, the farmers wept.”

Fortune rejected the finished article and it took until 1941 to find a publisher, but Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was an instant classic and has remained in print for three-quarters of a century. The families turned on Evans and Agee in time, claiming they were made to look ignorant and hopeless; decades later, one of the children still complained his family hadn’t been sent a copy of the book.

The show made Evans’ name in photography. He turned his back on the romanticism that prevailed in his time, opting for a plainspoken style that simply showed people and places as they were. Evans was much influenced by the work of the French photographer Eugene Atget (1857-1927), whose work also featured commonplace themes.

House, Charleston, South Carolina, 1936

He was given the first one-artist photography show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938; in 1945 he joined Time as a staff writer, moving shortly to Fortune, an editor of the magazine that rejected his work a decade earlier.

Evans worked there until 1965, with time out for teaching photography at Yale, and other personal projects. MOMA gave him a career retrospective show in 1971. In 1973, finding his old cameras too bulky to manage, Evans adopted the new Polaroid SX-70 camera and an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer. “The virtues of the camera fit perfectly with his search for a concise yet poetic vision of the world: its instant prints were, for the infirm seventy-year-old photographer, what scissors and cut paper were for the aging Matisse,” notes the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s biographical sketch of the artist. “The unique SX-70 prints are the artist's last photographs, the culmination of half a century of work in photography.”

He married twice- both times, it appears, for appearances’ sake. The second time, he was 57, and his wife was a Swiss national thirty years his junior. His diffidence in personal matters, her hero-worship, and his failing health made for a fraught affair, but a juicy tell-all book in which she settled up accounts a few years ago.

Walker Evans died in 1975. He left his non-government archive to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Evans’ work has become the iconography of the Great Depression, and has influenced photographers to the present day. His work is in the permanent collection of every significant museum in America.