Walker Evans: Aperture Masters of Photography

The photography of Walker Evans (1903-75) is introduced in a new, redesigned and expanded edition of Aperture's classic book from its Masters of Photography series. Evans helped define documentary photography and is considered one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. He captured the American experience from the late 1920s to the early 1970s with graceful articulation. From 1935 to 1937, Evans documented rural America during the Great Depression while working for the Farm Security Administration. Much of Evans' work from that period focused on three sharecropping families in southern Alabama, culminating in the revolutionary 1941 photobook Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with text by James Agee. His enduring appreciation for inanimate, seemingly ordinary objects and the vernacular as subject matter is evident in his photographs of shop windows, rural churches, billboards and architecture. Photography historian David Campany contributes a new introduction and image commentary to this volume, which includes some of Evans' best known and loved photographs.

Format: Hardback
Number of pages: 96
Publication date: 2016-01-26
Measurements: 8.4 x 8.2 x 0.6 inches
ISBN: 9781597113434

Walker Evans did more to expand the art and language of documentary photography than any other photographer, influencing generations of image-makers. He created some of the most memorable images of social and photographic history, and is best-known for his direct, descriptive photographs of vernacular scenes—particularly those of rural America, made during the Great Depression while Evans was working for the Farm Security Administration. His work about three sharecropping families in the South resulted in the groundbreaking book, coauthored with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
Walker Evans did more to expand the art and language of documentary photography than any other photographer, influencing generations of image-makers. He created some of the most memorable images of social and photographic history, and is best-known for his direct, descriptive photographs of vernacular scenes—particularly those of rural America, made during the Great Depression while Evans was working for the Farm Security Administration. His work about three sharecropping families in the South resulted in the groundbreaking book, coauthored with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
David Campany is one of the finest and most accessible writers on photography. He has published several books, among them The Open Road (Aperture, 2014), Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (2013), and Photography and Cinema (2008). He contributes regularly to a range of publications, including Aperture and Frieze, and teaches at the University of Westminster, London. His recent curatorial projects include Walker Evans: Anonymous (Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles, France, 2015) and A Handful of Dust (Le Bal, Paris, 2014).