Chronology

1803:Born in St Louis, Missouri
1908:Family moves to Kenilworth, Illinois
1914:Family moves to Toledo, Ohio
1922:Attends Williams college. Leaves in 1923
1924:Works in the map room of the New York Public library. Begins to write short stories
1926:Leaves NY for France
1927:Returns to the US
1928:Moves to Brooklyn Heights.
1930:Brooklyn Bridge pictures appear in hart crane's poem the bridge. Photographs appear in the magazines..
1931:Photographs Victorian houses for a project by Lincoln Kirstein and John Wheelwright.
1932:Photographs Cuba for the book the crime of Cuba. Photographs of achitecture from the Kirstein/Wheelwright project appear at the Museum of Modern Art.
1934:Commissioned for a book on architecture of the South and New Orleans. Meets Jane Smith Ninas in New Orleans.
1935:Appointed assistant specialist in information for the Resettlement Administration.
1936:Assigned with the writer James Agee for a Fortune article on white tenant farmers in the south
1937:Loses his appointment at the resettlement Administration.
1938:First one-person photography show at museum of modern Art. The Book American photographs is published with the exhibition.
1938:Begins subway portraits series.
1939:Jane moves to New York.
1941:Wins a Guggenheim foundation fellowship.
1941:Let Us Praise Famous Men is published.
1941:Marries Jane.
1941:Photographs Florida for the book the Mangrove Coast.
1942:Hired by Time Magazine as a movie and art critic.
1945:Becomes the Photography editor for fortune.
1947:Retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.
1956:Jane leaves
1959:Wins Second Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship
1960:Marries Isabelle Boeschenstein
1965:Hired to teach photography at Yale University
1966:Subway portraits are published as Many are called.
1966:Small retrospective of Work is shown at the Schoelkopf Gallery, New York.
1968:Awarded an honorary doctorate of letters from Williams College.
1971:Second Major retrospective, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York
1974: Recieves the Nationel institute of arts and letters award for Distinguished Service to the arts.
1975:Dies on April 10 after returning from a lecure in Boston
2000:Third Major retrospective, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

New Orleans street corner. Louisiana

Influences

Walker Evans: Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, 1931. Photograph: catalogue.

Evans was influenced by the French photographer Eugène Atget, whose work he got to now in 1929 thanks to his friend Berenice Abbott. Walker was also impressed by another Frenchman, Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose pictures he admired when they were first shown in New York in 1933.
The result of the experience was his classic book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.  Evans worked as a staff photographer for Fortune. He died in 1975.
 

His Family And his studies

Walker Evans was born in Saint Louis in 1903. His father was an ambitious advertising executive. The family moved to a new suburb north of Chicago. When Walker was twelve, his father took a job in Toledo, Ohio,. It was a shocking experience for Walker to live in a small town full of immigrants. His parents divorced. His mother and sister moved to New York in 1919, his father stayed in Ohio and moved in with the woman next door. Walker, 16, was sent to  a boarding school in northern Connecticut. Later, Yale refused him entrance and he finally went to Williams College instead. He was much into contemporary literature. After his freshman year, he dropped out of college. Lives in New York, he began to write.

In 1926, he sailed for Paris and stayed abroad thirteen months where his accomplished his education in international modernism. He return to New York in May of 1927, together with his French books, his literary aspirations and his handful of little photographs.
In late 1928 or early 1929, Evans went to see 65-year old patriarch of American fine-art photography Alfred Stieglitz. Evans established his own documentary style as a Stieglitz antipode. He refined his concept of his subject and worked to make a seemingly simple.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American Photographer .He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent" Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions the Metropolitan Museum of Art or George Eastman House.