Walker Evans

A young man, born in 1903 in the Midwest and coming from a middle-class family, with a penchant for literature and linguistic talent, an admirer of France in terms of lifestyle and poetry, especially Flaubert and Baudelaire (but also Gide and Cendrars), this young man returns to New York after a year in France (1926/27) and is pleased to see that the wealthy are hit hard by the stock market crash of 1929. He picks up a camera and, almost from the first images, takes remarkable photographs of the world as he sees it – and this world is the American one.

With these words, Svetlana Alpers (born 1936), one of the most respected art historians in the USA, begins her major study on Walker Evans (1903–1975). Throughout her career, she has focused on European painting, but now, for the first time, she engages with a photographer and an American.

The trigger may have been Evans' inclination towards literature. He originally aspired to be a writer but ended up creating a body of work that is considered the most significant contribution of America to 20th-century photography.

She pays special attention to the crucial year in France, Evans' literary role models Flaubert and Baudelaire, and the documentary poetry of Eugène Atget, whom he referred to as his "greatest photographic predecessor." The first commissioned work and Evans' only project outside the USA – the 31 images for the book The Crime of Cuba and the over 400 photographs he took in just one month in Cuba in 1933 – establishes his life motto of "subsidized freedom": to travel and photograph with maximum independence while being paid. America becomes his sole subject: the mining regions of the North, shops and shanties of Black people in the South, three white tenant families in Alabama, the tradition of minstrel shows, the Civil War, and more.