Walker Evans

"In 1933, Walker Evans traveled to Cuba to take photographs for The Crime of Cuba, a book by the American journalist Carleton Beals. Beals's explicit goal was to expose the corruption of Cuban dictator Gerardo Machado and the long, torturous relationship between the United States and Cuba.". "As novelist and poet Andrei Codrescu points out in the essay that accompanies this selection of photographs from the Getty Museum's collection, Evans's photographs are the work of an artist whose temperament was distinctly at odds with Beals's impassioned rhetoric. Evans's photographs of Cuba were made by a young, still maturing artist who - as Codrescu argues - was just beginning to combine his early, formalist aesthetic with the social concerns that would figure prominently in his later work."--BOOK JACKET.

First noted for his portrayal of the Depression-era South, Walker Evans (1903-1975) stands among the world's greatest photographers. One of the finest collections of Walker Evans's work in private hands is that of Marian and Benjamin A. Hill of Atlanta. 62 photographs are superbly reproduced in this book and described in an illuminating essay.

"Collection of 89 photographs taken by Evans in New York City's subways between 1938 and 1941."--Amazon.

"More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of an essential America that we have long accepted as fact, American Photographs, first published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938, is the purest and most complete expression of his cool, unblinking vision. the eighty-seven photographs reproduced on its pages are as relevant and essential as ever, with Lincoln Kirstein's essay as their eloquent foil. American Photographs has been a key touch-stone for photographers and those who seek to understand the lyric potential of the medium, but it has often been out of print. This Seventy-Fifth-Anniversary Edition, with sumptuous duotone plates complementing the elegant restraint of the original typography and design, makes Evans's landmark book available again. For the first time, digital technologies aid in emulating the precise cropping and finely tuned balance of the 1938 reproductions, capturing as never before the look and feel of the first edition."--cover jacket.

"This book maps the creative range of a great American artist. Its 219 images, chosen from more than 20,000, span forty-five years of continuous activity"--Publisher's note (page ).

On assignment for "Fortune" magazine in 1936, Agee and Evans set out to explore the plight of sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Published for the first time, Agee's original dispatch (accompanied by 25 of Evans' historic photographs) is an unsparing record of three families at a desperate time.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a book with text by American writer James Agee and photographs by American photographer Walker Evans, first published in 1941 in the United States. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men grew out of an assignment the two men accepted in 1936 to produce a Fortune magazine article on the conditions among sharecropper families in the American South during the "Dust Bowl". It was the time of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs designed to help the poorest segments of the society. Agee and Evans spent eight weeks that summer researching their assignment, mainly among three white sharecropping families mired in desperate poverty. They returned with Evans' portfolio of stark images—of families with gaunt faces, adults and children huddled in bare shacks before dusty yards in the Depression-era nowhere of the deep south—and Agee's detailed notes. As he remarks in the book's preface, the original assignment was to produce a "photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers". However, as the Literary Encyclopedia points out, "Agee ultimately conceived of the project as a work of several volumes to be entitled Three Tenant Families, though only the first volume, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was ever written". Agee considered that the larger work, though based in journalism, would be "an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity"

The photos of the Farm Security Administration of the 1930s, in an unprecedented feat, documented an entire land and its people. Of the 270,000 photos taken between 1937 and 1943, under the enthusiastic goading of Roy Stryker, hundreds today are considered masterpieces of photography worthy of exhibition and publication as art. Taken by such great photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, and Russell Lee, and showing that even in poverty there is a spirit of hope, these images, which are a national treasure, bring to life a historic time.--cover