Evans, Walker, 1903-1975

Walker Evans (1903-1975) was a photographer.

Photographer and professor at Yale; best known for documenting the people and conditions of the southern United States during the Great Depression.

Photographer; b. 1903; d. 1975.

Epithet: photographer

Evans, Walker. American Photographer. Born: St. Louis, Missouri, November 3, 1903. Education: Loomis School, Windsor, Connecticut, until 1922; Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, 1922; Williams College, Williams-town, Massachusetts, 1922-23; Sorbonne, Paris, 1926-27; mainly self-taught in photography. Family: Married and divorced twice. Career: Worked in the Public Library, New York City, 1923-25; freelance photographer, New York, from 1928; Staff Photographer, under Roy Stryker, Farm Security Administration (FSA), mainly in the southern United States, 1935-37; Associate Editor and Photographer, Fortune magazine, New York, 1945-65; retired from professional photography, 1965. Professor of Graphic Arts, 1964-74, and Emeritus Professor, 1974-75, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut; Artist-in-Residence, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, 1972. Recipient: Guggenheim Fellowship, 1940, 1941, 1959; Carnegie Corporation Award, New York, 1962; Mark Rothko Foundation Grant, New York, 1973. D. Litt.: Williams College, 1968. Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1968; Member, National Institute of Arts and Letters, Washington, D.C., 1973. Died: (in New Haven, Connecticut) April 10, 1975. Since his 1971 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, Walker Evans has been generally acknowledged as America's finest documentary photographer and the artist who more than any other created the image Americans have of the Great Depression of the 1930s.