Initially hoping to become a writer, Evans went to
Paris in 1926 to study literature. After returning to the United
States, he began to establish himself as a photographer with images
of architecture and everyday life. In 1933, writer Lincoln Kirstein
described Evans’s work as possessing a ‘tender cruelty’,
referring to his combination of a clear, factual gaze with empathy
for his subject matter. In 1935, Evans joined the Farm Security
Administration to document the lives of the rural poor at the height
of the Depression. With writer James Agee, he produced an extensive
study of white tenant farmers in the Deep South, published as Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).
A retrospective of Evans’s work was the first
major photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The accompanying publication American Photographs (1938)
was carefully selected and ordered by Evans, one of the first examples
of a photography book being presented as an important art form in
its own right. Evans’s other notable works included portraits
of passengers on the New York subway, taken using a concealed camera.
