Walker Evans (1903–1975) was an American photographer best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".
Walker Evans was also interested in anonymous street portraiture all his life. He recognized that the camera, used properly, could reveal the very values of a society in the people's conscious and unconscious adornments, in their displays and expressions, in their gait and glance, and in their furnishings and entertainments. The photographs of street types reveal Evans' incipient use of the documentary style, a clear counterpoint to the more stylized and graphic architectural photographs he was producing concurrently at the beginning of his fifty-year career with the camera.
