Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories

Walker Evans (1903–75) was one of the greatest of 20th-century American photographers. His images of people and scenes of rural and urban life during the Great Depression have become our collective visual memory of the era. His collaboration with author James Agee produced an extraordinary book documenting an Alabama sharecropper family, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Historian/biographer Lesy’s (emeritus, literary journalism, Hampshire Coll., MA; Wisconsin Death Trip) highly readable biography is enriched by the author’s personal connection with Evans. Lesy met the photographer (the encounter is vividly sketched here) in Evans’s last years, an éminence grise still actively making pictures, teaching, and creatively experimenting. “Life stories” constitute the major part of this biography, filled with intimate and frank details about Evans and his friends, colleagues, and lovers. Includes over 50 of Evans’s late-career, color, SX-70 Polaroid instant-film images.