Walker Evans

Walker Evans was born on 3 November 1903 in St. Louis, Missouri. His early education included the Loomis Institute and Mercersburg Academy before he graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1922. He spent one year, 1922 to 1923, studying French literature at Williams College before leaving without a degree. In 1926 and 1927 he lived in Paris, where he audited non-degree classes for foreign students at the Sorbonne while attempting to become a writer.

Evans turned to photography in the late 1920s after returning to New York. Between 1935 and 1937 he worked for the Farm Security Administration, documenting rural poverty in the American South; that work, together with his 1941 collaboration with writer James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, became a touchstone of American documentary photography. In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art presented American Photographs, its first solo exhibition devoted to a single photographer. Evans later worked as a staff photographer and editor at Fortune magazine and, from 1965, taught photography at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture.

Evans died on 10 April 1975 in New Haven, Connecticut, at the age of 71. The New York Times reported that he died the previous day of a brain hemorrhage at Yale-New Haven Hospital. In 1994 his estate gave its holdings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which became the sole copyright holder of his work and established the Walker Evans Archive as the primary repository and authority for his photographs.

Evans's standing rests on an unusually long, consistent critical consensus rather than a rediscovery narrative. Critics trace much of his influence to curator John Szarkowski's introduction to Evans's 1971 Museum of Modern Art retrospective, in which Szarkowski credited Evans with reshaping how viewers see not only other photographs but everyday American subjects such as billboards, junkyards, postcards, gas stations, and vernacular architecture. That framing, of Evans as the source of a whole visual vocabulary rather than a maker of individual masterpieces, has anchored the museum literature on him since, from the 1938 MoMA debut through the Metropolitan Museum's 2000 retrospective and the international touring survey that reached the High Museum of Art, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Martin-Gropius-Bau, and SFMOMA over the following two decades.

Evans's photographs circulate through a well established secondary market anchored by major auction houses and specialist photography dealers. According to auction-market aggregators, his current auction high is Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama, a vintage print of his best known Depression-era portrait, which sold for USD 389,000 at Sotheby's New York on 6 October 2014. His work is presented commercially through Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, among other specialist dealers, and rights and attribution run through the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art rather than through a published catalogue raisonne.

Evans has no published catalogue raisonne. Authentication and rights instead run through the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which became the estate's sole copyright holder in 1994, so provenance research for any print should begin there. Commercial availability is concentrated through Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, and because Evans worked in multiple printings and periods, print date and vintage matter as much as image and edition when comparing prices. The auction record cited here comes from secondary market-data aggregators rather than a primary auction-house release, so collectors should confirm any specific sale result directly with the auction house before relying on it.