Walker Evans
Photographs by Walker Evans from his 1936 trip documenting sharecropping families in Hale County, Alabama, drawn from the Ewing Gallery's permanent collection.
In 1936, photographer Walker Evans and writer James Agee were sent on assignment by Fortune Magazine to observe and document the daily lives of three sharecropping families in Hale County, Alabama. The resulting book of their three-week stay was published in 1941 as Now Let Us Let Us Praise Famous Men. Walker Evans is best known for his documentary photographs of the United States. He spent his early career experimentally photographing the streets of New York.
In 1935, he worked for the Farm Security Administration and travelled through the mid-west and southern states of America creating some of his most important and significant work. In 1938, Evans was the first photographer that the Museum of Modern Art in New York honored with a solo exhibition titled Walker Evans, American Photographs. These photographs from the Ewing Gallery Permanent Collection were taken on Evans' trip to Hale County, Alabama.