Evans, Walker (1903-1975), was an American photographer who became best known for his pictures of Southern sharecroppers of the 1930’s. Evans’s photographs capture the poverty and desolation of rural life in the Southern United States during the Great Depression. A group of 31 of his pictures and a text by James Agee were published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The book portrays the lives of three poor sharecropper families in Alabama.
Evans was born on Nov. 2, 1903, in St. Louis, Missouri. He took up photography in 1928 after failing in an attempt to be a writer. Evans often photographed such common subjects as billboards, pedestrians, and subway riders. During the 1930’s, he took pictures of farms, towns, and cities in the East and the South for the government. Many of these pictures appear in his book American Photographs (1938).
From 1945 to 1965, Evans worked for Fortune magazine. He taught at Yale University from 1965 until his death on April 10, 1975.
