Walker Evans Photographs

American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975), with his direct and unsentimental images of life on small-town streets, in New York subways, and on sharecroppers’ porches, inspired generations of photographers and helped shape contemporary art. The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University presents a broad survey of Evans’ 50-year career, drawn entirely from the collection of Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80. The exhibition, entitled “Walker Evans,” opens Feb. 1 and continues through April 8, 2012.

This exhibition encompasses not only Evans’ brilliant documentation of the Great Depression and his work with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the landmark study of three tenant farm families in Alabama published in 1941, but also his little-known experimental photographs from 1928 to 1930; the subway series (1938–41) later published in the monograph Many Are Called; photo-essays for Fortune magazine (1945–65); and rare Polaroid SX-70 prints from his final years. The exhibition includes more than 125 vintage prints as well as an extensive selection of Evans’ original books and magazines. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art.

Walker Evans, Alabama Tenant Farmer, 1936. Gelatin silver print. Lent by Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80. © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Walker Evans, Main Street, Saratoga Springs,
New York, 1931. Gelatin silver print. Lent by Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80.
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Walker Evans, Broadway, 1930. Gelatin silver print.
Lent by Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80.
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Walker Evans, Main Street Block, Selma, Alabama, 1936
Gelatin silver print
Lent by Elizabeth and Robert J. Fisher, MBA ’80.
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art