Sidewalk in Vicksburg, Mississippi

Walker Evans played a pivotal role in American photography, refusing to sentimentalize or manufacture narratives. Instead, he sought to create photographs that were detached or unmediated: "nonsubjective," he called them. Born in St. Louis to a well-to-do family, Evans moved to New York City in 1923, settling in Greenwich Village. There he met writers Lincoln Kirstein and James Agee, and artist and photographer Ben Shahn; with each of them he collaborated on a variety of projects. Evans traveled to Cuba in 1933 to illustrate American journalist Carleton Beals's book The Crime of Cuba. In 1936, an assignment for Fortune magazine with Agee culminated in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a landmark publication that chronicled in text and photographs the lives of Southern sharecroppers.

During the Depression, Evans photographed poor, rural people in what he believed were unsentimental, direct, and objective ways. From 1935 to 1938, he worked for the Farm Security Administration's (FSA) Historical Section under the directorship of Roy Stryker, who also hired other photographers including Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Gordon Parks, and Dorothea Lange. Sidewalk in Vicksburg, Mississippi, made for the FSA, shows how deeply immersed Evans was in photographing the American scene, recording commonplace subjects impersonally. Here, an automobile with only its front half visible is parked in front of a wooden building with men idling outside in midday sunshine. Evans often made a number of photographs of the same scene; half a dozen other exposures (in the FSA Collection, Library of Congress) capture different moments: a close-up of some of the men, general views of the street, and various storefronts.

American Photographs, Evan's 1938 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, was the first at MoMA dedicated to the work of a single photographer.