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.