Walker Evans

The Depression Era photographs of Alabama sharecroppers by Walker Evans remain among the most indelible and iconic images in the American consciousness. Indeed, the entire oeuvre of this great photographer is one of the most influential bodies of photographic work in this century.

As James R. Mellow's landmark biography makes clear, however, Walker Evans was not the propagandist for social causes he was presumed to be. He was, instead, a fastidious observer of the true nature of things or, as he himself has said, of "things as they are". His instinctive aversion to artifice set him apart from the formalism of his photographic predecessor, Alfred Stieglitz, as well as from his immediate contemporary, Ansel Adams.