the hungry eye, bio of walker evans

In 'Walker Evans : The Hungry Eye , author Gilles Mora attempts to capture and represent every significant aspect of the photographer 's life and times via his art work . Evans was a Depression-era photographer with the Farm Security Administration and later editor of Fortune magazine . His work was featured in Time magazine and he was the first photographer to be given a solo show at New York 's Museum of Modern Art in 1938 . In 1935 , he had his first photograph display at the museum , a series he called African Negro Art

Evans

did not initially set out to be a photographer , but ended up as part of a class of FSA photographers that included such greats as Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams . He was born to well-to-do parents in St Louis in 1903 and attend college in New York for a year before going to Paris to see the world . In 1927 , he returned to the New York literary scene making friends with others who would go on to have a huge impact on his career . He first began taking photographs in 1928 and worked on Wall Street as a clerk to a stockbroker until the stock market crash in 1929 . A year later his first photographs , of the Brooklyn Bridge , were published in a book of poetry by Hart Crane

During the Depression , Evans toured Cuba where he met Earnest Hemingway and worked for the Resettlement Administration in West Virginia before joining the FSA . He spent a great deal of time shooting American architecture as a manner of recording history and life and also spent 3 weeks living with sharecroppers in Alabama for a piece for Time magazine that James Agee was supposed to write . The piece did not meet Time 's standards , but he and Agee would publish the story and photos in 1941 in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Evans primarily used an 8 ' by 10 ' large format camera for his Depression era work , though he would switch to 35 mm in his later years He is primarily known for his attempt to document life as it was without the influence of the photographer being felt in the photographs . This was , of course , impossible given the medium that he was using . The large size format combine with the film type meant that often his subjects would have to remain motionless for several minutes while the film was exposing . Still , even his staged photographs appeared to be accurate scenes of life in the South in the Depression

During World War II , Evans was a regular contributor to Time magazine and after the war he joined the staff of Fortune magazine where he was a regular contributor until 1965 . In 1965 , he left the magazine to become a professor of graphic design at Yale Univeristy in New Haven Conn , where he remained until his death in 1975 . Evans is best known for his Depression era work , but he also did several series after the war attempting to document...