Walker Evans was interested in anonymous street portraiture all his life. He recognized that the camera, used properly, could reveal the very values of a society in the people's conscious and unconscious adornments, in their displays and expressions, in their gait and glance, and in their furnishings and entertainments. The photographs of street types reveal Evans' incipient use of the documentary style, a clear counterpoint to the more stylized and graphic architectural photographs he was producing concurrently at the beginning of his fifty-year career with the camera.

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