Walker Evans

In 1926 Walker Evans dropped out of Williams College and arrived in Paris to launch his career as a writer. Though his life there revolved around the renowned Shakespeare and Company bookstore, a mixture of introversion and disdain for American culture kept him at a remove from the now famous expatriate circle of the era: Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and James Joyce. He spent most of his time abroad alone and picked up his camera from time to time to document his immediate world, making images of his boarding room and his own shadow against a wall. When he returned to the US, Evans began to dedicate more time to his hobby, and by the end of his long career had established himself as one of the most important modernist photographers. Walker Evans, the catalogue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's retrospective of Evans's work (exhibiting February to May 2000, then moving on to other venues), is proof that his choice to abandon writing for photography left the cultural world richer. It is also arguably the best book available on the photographer and his images.

The Metropolitan possesses the bulk of Evans's archive and its curators discovered hundreds of previously unknown negatives stored at the Library of Congress. The catalogue's introductory essays by such writers as Maria Morris Hambourg, head of photography for the Met, sketch the biographical details of Evans's life and explore his works in depth. But the real treat is to browse the nearly 200 plates. Evans's early work focused on New York City but he soon fanned out, photographing main drags and battered buildings in upstate New York and Pennsylvania. He also explored the people of Havana, Cuba and the rural American South in some of his best-known work. By the mid-1970s, Evans was working in colour, but his imagery remained consistent. Arriving at the close of this book, readers can only thank the fates that Evans gave up his ambitions as a writer to devote himself wholly to his "left-handed hobby" of photography. --Jordana Moskowitz

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View books by Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, Mia Fineman.