42nd Street

1928

Taking up photography

In 1928, around the time he is living in Ossining, New York, Evans takes up photography; his influences include Eugène Atget and August Sander.

May – June 1933

An assignment in Cuba

In May and June 1933 Evans takes photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals' “The Crime of Cuba”, a “strident account” of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He documents street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes; 31 of his photographs will appear in Beals' book.

June 1935

A miners' settlement and a staff post at the RA

In 1935 Evans spends two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania; in June he accepts a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlays this temporary employment into a full-time position as an “information specialist” in the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) and from October 1935 on does photographic work for it, primarily in the Southern United States.

summer 1936

Hale County with James Agee, on assignment for Fortune

In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, Evans and the writer James Agee are sent by Fortune to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opts not to run.

1938

“Walker Evans: American Photographs” at MoMA

The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds “Walker Evans: American Photographs”, the museum's first exhibition devoted to the work of a single photographer; the catalogue includes an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans befriended in his early days in New York.

1941

“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is published

Evans's photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression are published as the groundbreaking book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty.