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In 1994 The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired the personal archive of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975). The Walker Evans Archive contains the artist's life's work—forty thousand negatives and transparencies dating from the late 1920s to the early 1970s—as well as Evans's personal and professional correspondence, papers, diaries, family photo albums, and his collection of books, picture postcards, clippings, roadside signs, and works by other artists.
Search the Walker Evans Archive
Walker Evans left to posterity a remarkably rich record of his creative process and inner life. The Walker Evans Archive is the repository for all of Evans's work with the camera, from his earliest boyhood snapshots to his seldom-seen color Polaroids made in the year before his death. It includes dynamic views of the streets of Brooklyn and New York City, architectural studies of Victorian houses in New England, his famous work in the rural and urban south during the Great Depression, and hidden-camera portraits of subway passengers. The Archive also preserves Evans's seminal photographs of Havana and its people in the last weeks of the Machado regime, as well as the extensive photographic portfolios and short essays Evans produced during his twenty-year tenure (1945–1964) as Special Photographic Editor for Fortune magazine. The topics include railroad company insignias, common tools, downtown Chicago, New York's Pennsylvania Station, industrial towns in New England, and old summer resort hotels.
The Depression Years
Known as the progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans remains most celebrated for his photographs made in the American south during the Depression. Between 1935 and 1937, Evans worked as a photographer for the government's Resettlement (later called the Farm Security) Administration, in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Throughout the South, he distilled from the simple, the poor, and the ordinary the basic grammar of local American life, an unconscious American style, and an authentic visual identity. He grafted onto this project another with James Agee, to create a written and photographic portrait of tenant farmers in Alabama, which eventually became the quintessential Depression-era document Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). The Walker Evans Archive offers an unparalleled view into the artist's methods and achievement during this period and is rich in both published and unpublished photographs and related documents, including diaries and shooting lists that amplify and greatly enrich our understanding of twentieth-century American history and contemporary art practice. (These materials integrate seamlessly with related negatives in the collection of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
Papers and Correspondence
Walker Evans expressed his ideas primarily through photography and secondarily through writing, collecting, and lecturing. Before he discovered the camera, Evans's first love was literature, and originally he wanted to be a writer. Instead, he brought the strategies of literature—lyricism, irony, incisive description, and sequencing—into the medium of photography. The Walker Evans Archive preserves Evans's translations (from French), literary essays, criticism, book reviews, and short stories in finished and draft form. It holds the articles that accompany his photographs published in Fortune, Harper's Bazaar, Architectural Forum, and numerous other magazines, as well as his library (primarily of modernist literature) and a surprisingly prescient album made with his friend James Agee of newspaper clippings from the 1920s and 30s that prefigures Pop and Conceptual Art by three decades.
Over the course of his fifty-year career, Evans had numerous exhibitions, including retrospectives in 1938 (after only ten years of work) and 1971, both at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and in 1948 at The Art Institute of Chicago. The Archive contains extensive correspondence and paperwork relating to these important shows, as well as materials documenting his professional relationships with other museums, commercial galleries, and publishers.
Through the Walker Evans Archive, researchers can effectively study Evans's year-by-year work with the camera as well as his long-term interest in certain subjects, from architecture and small-town main streets to signage, advertising, and other vernacular forms. The Archive's correspondence materials allow researchers to examine the artist's particular interest in the American scene and the important intersections between Evans's thought and that of Hart Crane, Lincoln Kirstein, Ben Shahn, James Agee, Robert Fitzgerald, Robert Frank, Henry Allen Moe, and Diane Arbus—among the finest minds of the twentieth century from a cross-section of humanities and arts disciplines.
For Further Research
In order to consult the many resources of the Walker Evans Archive in their full and original form, serious scholars are encouraged to continue their research through on-site visits to the Study Room for Photographs. In essence, the Museum's Walker Evans Archive allows the public to see how Evans shaped and interpreted his material, how he refined his concept of the quotidian and often neglected subjects, and how he worked to make a seemingly simple image of a kitchen corner or barber shop appear inevitable, large in its symbolism, and irreducibly right.
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