Walker Evans

"Leonardo for me is the father of what I call the lyric documentary. And you all know too well what Leonardo is. But what I'm referring to particularly is Leonardo's medical drawings, his mechanical drawings, his embryological drawings. Those, too, you know awfully well and I won't dwell on them, other than to say that that line and that mental approach, that scientific curiosity and that cleanliness, and that detachment of his seemed to me documentary. And, of course, his line is lyric."
Walker Evans, excerpted from the transcript of his 1964 Yale University lecture, "Lyric Documentary."

ACTIVE BACKLIST

WALKER EVANS: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Introduction by Sarah Meister. Text by Lincoln Kirstein.
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK
ISBN: 9780870708350 | US $35.00
Pub Date: 8/31/2012
Active | In stock

WALKER EVANS: DECADE BY DECADE
Edited and with text by James Crump.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775733403 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 9/30/2012
Active | In stock

WALKER EVANS: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Text by Lincoln Kirstein, John T. Hill.
ERRATA EDITIONS
ISBN: 9781935004240 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 1/31/2011
Active | In stock

WALKER EVANS
Photographs by Walker Evans.
APERTURE
ISBN: 9780893817411 | US $12.50
Pub Date: 6/15/2005
Active | Not available

OUT OF PRINT LISTING

WALKER EVANS: DECADE BY DECADE
Edited and text by James Crump.
HATJE CANTZ
ISBN: 9783775724913 | US $75.00
Pub Date: 5/31/2010
Out of print | Not available

WALKER EVANS: AMERICAN PHOTOGRAPHS: BOOKS ON BOOKS NO. 2
Text by John Hill, Lincoln Kirstein, Jeffrey Ladd.
ERRATA EDITIONS
ISBN: 9781935004028 | US $39.95
Pub Date: 2/1/2009
Out of Print | Not available

RELATED PUBLICATIONS

REAL TO REAL
Introduction and foreword by Julian Cox. Text by Kevin Moore.
FINE ARTS MUSEUMS OF SAN FRANCISCO
ISBN: 9780884011347 | US $45.00
Pub Date: 6/30/2012
Active | In stock

Walker Evans

More than any other artist, Walker Evans (1903-1975) invented the image of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact. Evans did most of his best work in the 1930s, and his pictures have been celebrated as documents of the Great Depression. But his concerns ranged far beyond the troubles of the 1930s, and his work has made its impact not only on photography but also on modern literature, film and the traditional visual arts.

Featured image is from Walker Evans: Decade by Decade.

Walker Evans: American Photographs

Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Edition

Introduction by Sarah Meister. Text by Lincoln Kirstein.
Published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York

More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of America in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, “photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a Cuban political funeral or a Mississippi flood, working cautiously so as to disturb nothing in the normal atmosphere of the average place, can be considered a kind of disembodied, burrowing eye, a conspirator against time and its hammers.” This seventy-fifth anniversary edition of American Photographs, made with new reproductions, recreates the original 1938 edition as closely as possible to make the landmark publication available for a new generation. American Photographs has fallen out of print for long periods of time since it was first published, and even subsequent editions--two of which altered the design and typography of the book in small but significant ways--are often available only at libraries and rare bookstores. This version, like the fiftieth-anniversary edition produced by the Museum in 1988, captures the look and feel of the very first edition with the aid of new digital technologies.
Walker Evans (1903–1975) took up photography upon his return to New York in 1927, following a year in Paris when his aspiration to become a writer withered in the shadow of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Joyce. In 1935, Evans was commissioned by the Farm Security Administration to photograph the effects of the Great Depression in the Southeast. During this time he took many of the photographs that appeared in his collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a book which has become a defining document of that era. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945 and shortly thereafter became an editor at Fortune, where he stayed for the next two decades. In 1964, he became a professor at the Yale University School of Art, where he taught until his death in 1975.

Walker Evans: Decade by Decade

Edited and with text by James Crump.
Published by Hatje Cantz

Walker Evans (1903–1975) is, without doubt, one of the most influential American photographers ever, and many of his images have become fixed in the collective memory. But while Evans’ uncompromising depiction of poverty during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the subject of a series commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, has become a key chapter in the history of photography, his equally innovative images from later decades have generally commanded less attention. Back in print, this bilingual monograph attempts to redress the balance by examining Evans’ complete body of work, and features many rarely seen photographs, including his final works, a sequence of Polaroids shot in the early 1970s (a sequence made possible by an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer). Evans’ re-ascendancy in the 1970s and his relationship with legendary Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski are also closely examined, in this essential and definitive volume on a great photographer who certainly achieved his aim to produce pictures that were “literate, authoritative, transcendent.”

Walker Evans: American Photographs

Books on Books No. 2

Text by Lincoln Kirstein, John T. Hill.
Published by Errata Editions

Walker Evans' American Photographs is widely deemed the most important photobook ever published. Originally conceived to be a catalogue to accompany his one-man show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 (the first solo show MoMA had given to a photographer), it quickly became a document so definitive of its era that curator John Szarkowski wrote that "it was difficult to know now whether Walker Evans recorded the America of his youth, or invented it." The book opens with images that cite photography, immediately establishing a tension between medium and message, although it is certainly for the message that Evans has become famous: American Photographs points over and over again to the unhappy lot of the poor and the dispossessed in 1930s America. Lincoln Kirstein's accompanying essay (famous in its own right) declares: "What poet has said as much? Only newspapers, the writers of popular music, the technicians of advertising and radio have, in their blind energy accidentally, fortuitously, evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment. And Evans' work has, in addition, intention, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection." American Photographs continues to go out of print for long stretches of time, and the first edition of Errata's 2009 spread-by-spread reprint followed suit. This revised edition of that volume presents the original 1938 edition with its 87 legendary black-and-white photographs (reproduced in full-page rather than quarter-page spreads), the classic Kirstein essay and a contemporary essay by Evans scholar John T. Hill.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans (1903-1975) took up photography in 1928. His book collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which portrayed the lives of three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Depression, has become one of that era's most defining documents. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945, and shortly after moved to Fortune, where he stayed until 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art. Evans died at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975.
The Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.

Walker Evans: Decade by Decade

Edited and text by James Crump.
Published by Hatje Cantz

Walker Evans (1903–1975) is, without doubt, one of the most influential American photographers ever, and many of his images have become fixed in the collective memory. But while Evans' uncompromising depiction of poverty during the Great Depression of the 1930s, the subject of a series commissioned by the Farm Security Administration, has become a key chapter in the history of photography, his equally innovative images from later decades have generally commanded less attention. This exciting new monograph attempts to redress the balance by examining Evans' complete body of work, and features many rarely seen photographs, including his final works, a sequence of Polaroids shot in the early 1970s (a sequence made possible by an unlimited supply of film from its manufacturer). Evans' re-ascendancy in the 1970s, and his close relationship with legendary Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski, are also closely examined, in this essential and definitive volume on a great photographer who certainly achieved his aim to produce pictures that were “literate, authoritative, transcendent.”Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Walker Evans (1903–1975) took up photography in 1928. His book collaboration with James Agee, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), which portrayed the lives of three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Depression, has become one of that era's most defining documents. Evans joined the staff of Time magazine in 1945, and shortly after moved to Fortune magazine, where he stayed until 1965. That year, he became a professor of photography at the Yale University School of Art. Evans died at his home in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in 1975.

Walker Evans: American Photographs: Books on Books No. 2

Text by John Hill, Lincoln Kirstein, Jeffrey Ladd.
Published by Errata Editions

Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.
Walker Evans' American Photographs is arguably the most important photobook ever published. Originally conceived as a catalogue to accompany Evan's one-man show at The Museum of Modern Art in 1938, it has been out of print for many long stretches of time. Books on Books 2 presents the original 1938 edition with the 87 legendary black-and-white photographs that defined the documentary-style aesthetic. This volume also reproduces Lincoln Kirstein's great original essay as well as a contemporary piece by John T. Hill, the author of many books on Evans, including Lyric Documentary, published in 2006.

Walker Evans

Masters of Photography Series

Photographs by Walker Evans.
Published by Aperture

Walker Evans, more than any other photographer in the thirties and forties, defined the documentary aesthetic. For over four decades he used his camera precisely and lucidly to record the American experience. He is generally acknowledged as America's finest documentary photographer of the twentieth century. He attempted to show both the beauty of his subjects and the horror of the social conditions in which they lived. During the Depression, from 1935 to 1937, Evans took part in the most extensive photographic project ever carried out in the United States--the pictorial survey of the Farm Security Administration. The now-legendary collaboration with James Agee that resulted in the masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men documents his dedication to photographing the country he knew. Evans' talented eye and sensitive heart make him one of the great photographers of the twentieth century. This volume contains many of his best-known images.