Walker Evans show puts pioneering photographer’s career in context

Walker Evans' photographs are among the most iconic images ever made of the South, but his body of work has never been exhibited in the region in a major way. That will change when the High Museum of Art presents the most comprehensive Evans retrospective ever to hit the southeastern United States June 11.

Exploring the full arc of Evans’ career from the 1920s to the 1970s, the show will feature more than 120 black-and-white and color prints including Evans’ most famous work made in the South on assignment for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression.

“Even if you don’t know much about Walker Evans, you will probably recognize the work he made in Hale County, Ala., looking at tenant farmers during the dust bowl,” says High Curator of Photography Brett Abbott. “Those pictures became really important as symbols of the American experience during that period. It’s exciting to think that pictures that were so important to the development of photography were created not so far away from Atlanta and the High Museum.”

The traveling exhibition, titled “Depth of Field,” originated last year at the Josef Albers Museum Quadrat in Bottrop, Germany. The photographs come from various collections, with images pulled from the Museum of Modern Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, the High’s permanent collection and from the collection of Atlanta couple Marian and Benjamin Hill, who own one of the best private collections of Evans’ work in the world. The High will be the only American stop for the tour.

Evans may be most famous for his photographs of the Depression-era South, but he had a long and varied career spanning more than 50 years and incorporating many different styles and approaches.

The exhibition, which will include a sizable group of his most familiar photographs, also seeks to place that work in the context of a much larger career by arranging a large body of his work chronologically. Viewers will get a sense of Evans’ biography, how his aesthetic developed, what his influences were and how he continued to push the art of photography forward throughout his life.

Evans’ own background contrasts markedly from that of the rural, impoverished subjects he came to be associated with. Born to a wealthy family in St. Louis in 1903, Evans graduated from the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., in 1922, and he planned to study French literature at Williams College but dropped out after only one year.

After leaving college, he spent a year in Paris in 1926 before returning home to New York. Although he worked a day job as a clerk in a Wall Street firm, he soon became part of an artistic and literary circle that included writer John Cheever, poet Hart Crane and impresario and New York City Ballet-founder Lincoln Kirstein. Evans took up photography in 1928, and his early work shows strong influences from European photographers such as Eugène Atget and August Sander whose work he was first exposed to during his time abroad.

The first room of the exhibition draws from this period of development, showing early portraiture and photographs made on the streets of New York in the late 1920s. In some of these early pictures, he begins to play with word-image juxtaposition in photos of vernacular advertising signage, a theme (and an early precursor of pop art) that would remain a constant throughout his career.

The next section of the show considers Evans’ early commissions before the FSA, exploring his innovative approach to documentary photography; Evans took commissions from magazines and publishers to pay his way to interesting places, but he often transformed the results into something personal and lyrical, far beyond a mere assignment. The show includes rare photographs Evans made in Cuba in the early 1930s, pictures documenting Victorian architecture and images of antebellum buildings.

The following room will include the famous images Evans made of the rural South in the 1930s. Evans worked for the FSA documenting the social fabric of the United States and the South during a difficult time, but some of the most famous images of this period were actually made on assignment for Fortune magazine.

At that time Evans worked with writer James Agee documenting the lives of sharecroppers in Hale County, Alabama. Fortune opted not to publish Agee’s heart-wrenching descriptions of desperate poverty and Evans’ stark photographs of hardscrabble, rural lives, but the resulting book, “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” is considered one of the great monumental classics of 20th century literature.

During this period, Evans photographed throughout the South including Alabama, Louisiana, West Virginia, and even Georgia and Atlanta. One Evans photograph from 1936 included in the exhibition shows a hauntingly evocative, empty Atlanta barber shop,

The final gallery will be devoted to Evans’ later work: his less-familiar color photography, his work with covert street and candid subway photography and other book projects.

“It’s really a show that’s meant to take the Walker Evans that you know and expand your perception of who he was as an artist,” says Abbott. The show is composed almost exclusively of prints made during Evans’ lifetime.

While Evans’ subjects pop to life with a sense of robust personality captured in a moment of crystalline clarity, the photographer remained somewhat elusive. An early self-portrait on display shows only Evans’ shadow.

“It fits his style,” says Abbott. “It’s a really unmannered approach, a style that almost pretends there’s no one there behind the camera. But the photographs are thoughtfully composed and highly structured. They have an ease to them that feels natural.”

When Evans first picked up a camera in the 1920s, photography was considered a lowly art form of mere documentation. But by the time he died in 1975, the medium had started to take its place alongside more traditional art forms, and Evans played a central role in that transformation.

“He really was a part of pioneering the art of photography in 20th century America,” says Abbott.