© Estate of Walker Evans/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

While only three years his junior, Evans idolized Hemingway. He had actually wanted to be a writer, having dropped out of Williams College and moved to Paris to pursue a literary career. After immersing himself in both the visual and literary culture of France, Evans returned home and took up the camera in place of the pen.

For his first major photographic project, Evans was hired to provide photographic illustrations for Carleton Beals’s The Crime of Cuba, a blistering critique of the American government’s support for Cuba’s corrupt and oppressive government led by President Gerardo Machado. Although the book made the New York Times’s bestseller list, it never had the chance to affect American policy. By the time it was published, the U.S. had already withdrawn its support for Machado, and his bloodthirsty regime fell that August. Still, the project’s photographic legacy was profound, for it was during his month in Cuba that Evans honed his signature picture-making style: an unblinking, neutral gaze applied to people and places alike. Indeed, Evans’s spare, unemotional approach, free of artifice and “artiness,” was the photographic equivalent of Hemingway’s stripped-down literary style.

Within a few years Evans would employ this same vision in his home country, documenting the lives of impoverished Americans during the Great Depression, as well as vernacular Southern architecture, as a member of the photographic unit of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration. This project would culminate in the Museum of Modern Art’s first one-man photographic show, Walker Evans: American Photographs (1938), whose exhibition catalog stands as one of the most important photo books of the 20th century. A parallel project, focused specifically on tenant farmers in Alabama, resulted in the 1941 publication of the ironically titled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which combined Evans’s pictures with text by James Agee. The images in both these books have become icons of the Depression and the families that lived through it.

The themes you will see in this show – street life, architecture, portraits, and poverty – would dominate Evans’s ensuing five-decade career, much of it spent at Fortune magazine. The college dropout ended his life as a professor at Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture, and is remembered as one of America’s greatest, and most influential, photographers.​