Walker Evans: Depth of Field

The High Museum of Art in Atlanta will present a major touring retrospective of the work of Walker Evans, one of the most pioneering and influential documentary photographers of the twentieth century. The show is among the most thorough examinations ever presented of the full arc of Evans’s career and the most comprehensive Evans retrospective to be mounted in Europe, Canada, and the southeastern United States. 

The exhibition will feature more than 120 black-and-white and color prints from the 1920s through the 1970s, including the artist’s iconic work made in the South during the Great Depression—work that would help forge what we now refer to as documentary photography. With a profundity that has not previously been accomplished, the exhibition and its companion publication explore the transatlantic roots and repercussions of Evans’s contributions to the field of photography and examine his development of the lyric documentary style, which fuses a powerful personal perspective with an objective record of time and place. 

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

Whether or not you go, the exhibition catalog, Walker Evans: Depth Of Field, is the most comprehensive study of Walker Evans's work ever published, containing masterful images accompanied by authoritative commentary from leading photography historians. This book traces the entire arc of Evans's remarkable career, from the 1930s to the 1970s, and the illustrations range from his earliest images taken with a vest pocket camera to his final photos using the then new SX-70 because his regular equipment had become too heavy to carry around. (...) In addition to offering a broad perspective on Evans's work, the book also clarifies the photographer's "anti-art" philosophy. Eschewing aesthetic hyperbole, Evans wanted his pictures to resonate with a wide audience. At the same time, his natural curiosity made him one of the most inventive photographers of all time. What these photographs and writings attest to is a huge and timeless talent, which came not from a camera, but from Evans's uniquely hungry eye.