Still Life: Documentary

During the Great American Depression of 1935 – 36, the Missouri-born photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) embarked on a photographic project that would produce some of the most iconic images in the history of photography.

Evans was employed as an ‘Information Specialist’ in President Franklin D Roosevelt’s Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration.  He was commissioned alongside other eminent photographers of the time (Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein) to record the work of the FSA’s rehabilitation programme, as well as to document the daily lives of farmers and flood victims.   

He travelled to Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina photographing churches, graveyards, busy streets, shops, cafes, signs and billboards as well as making more intimate portraits of family life.  He also recorded interiors and exteriors of sharecroppers’ homes, group portraits and the famous close-up portraits of the Burroughs family.   

These disquieting, provocative images are seen by many as the culmination of Evans’ photographic career, capturing the expressions of the weak and vulnerable and showing the fragility of their existence.  His work bears witness to the realities faced by Depression-era communities in the Deep South. 

Through the evidence of trial and error in successive images and through Evans's own words this important book reveals how a major American artist actually worked. The 747 photographs document chronologically his choice of subject and his lifelong technical experimentation. Page by page, the reader experiences what Evans saw, what he recorded and how he altered what he recorded to achieve the image he intended. One sees the same subject photographed with different lenses and in different lights.