Mrs. Lily Fields and Children

Walker Evans was born in 1903 and after an unfinished education he spent time in the 1920s Paris world of the many famous writers and artists who took up residence there. Returning to America in the late 1920s he took up photography in 1928 and it afforded him the opportunity to live, as he said, "very shabbily" in New York City. Evans worked for what was to be the Farm Security Administration (FSA) and his ideas about the systematic documentation of American culture impressed and influenced Roy Stryker, head of the Photographic Unit at FSA.

In 1936 Walker Evans and the writer, James Agee, went to Hale County, Alabama, on an assignment from Fortune magazine to do a story on the lives of sharecropper families in the cotton belt. The families, headed by kinsman Frank Tengle, Floyd Burroughs and Bud Fields, lived on adjacent properties. Evans and Agee stayed several weeks and eventually produced one of the seminal photo essay's on American life, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. His iconic Depression-era portraits of the families formed much of the American public's collective visual consciousness of the Great Depression. The FSA photographers were widely published all through the Depression, and captured their own great and significant images, particularly Dorothea Lange, but none focused on a single theme with such powerful iconic images and editorial writing as Evans and Agee.

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Product #: cph3c31667