Biography of Walker Evans here.
Below you will find a bunch of his photographs – interspersed with one of my favorite paragraphs from his collaboration with the brilliant James Agee: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Some of the photographs do come from his work with Agee – others are his urban photographs (which actually, I prefer – some of them strike me as living Edward Hoppers).
Enjoy!
From James Agee and Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Each is drawn else where toward another: once more a man and a woman, in a loneliness they are not liable at that time to notice, are tightened together upon a bed: and another family has begun:
Moreover, these flexions are taking place everywhere, like a simultaneous motion of all the waves of the water of the world: and these are the classic patterns, and this is the weaving, of human living: of whose fabric each individual is a part: and of all parts of this fabric let this be borne in mind:
Each is intimately connected with the bottom and extremest reach of time:
Each is composed of substances identical with the substances of all that surrounds him, both the common objects of his disregard, and the hot centers of stars.
All that each person is, and experiences, and shall never experience, in body and in mind, all these things are differing expressions of himself and of one root, and are identical:
not one of these things nor one of these persons is ever quite to be duplicated, nor replaced, nor has it ever quite had precedent: but each is a new and incommunicably tender life, wounded in every breath, and almost as hardly killed as easily wounded: sustaining, for a while, without defense, the enormous assaults of the universe.
