Artistic Style and Early Career

As Walker Evans began to develop his technical skills with a camera, his ongoing passion for literature proved to be very influential in the establishment of his photographic style. He states in his book, Photography, that “photography seems to be the most literary of the graphic arts.” Evans studies in literature allowed him to be sensitive to his environment and better able to carry out unbiased social observation as a photographer. In particular, he gained the skill of emphasizing irony and contrast in a given scene (Rosenheim 9). His photography displays a playfulness and wit more common in verbal than visual art (Hill 26).

Evans kept a scrapbook, as it were, a book of clippings of pictures by other artists and also “non-art”—illustrations, signs, etc. that parallel his raw and pared-down style (Rosenheim 208). Evans did not seek to be a great artist but simply had “a profound desire to show, to preserve a trace,” according to Henri Cartier-Bresson, a contemporary photographer and influence of Evans (Cartier-Bresson 13). It was Cartier-Bresson who allowed a young Evans to “understand fully the immense potentialities of the hand camera at split-second speed,” as he recalled regarding his 1926 journey in Paris (Cartier-Bresson 23).

The early, independent photography of Evans focused on contemporary American life in his own environment: New York City. He started with architecture: the streets and bridges of New York. Evans photographed in an abstract style, contrasting neon signs of Broadway with shadows of train platforms (“Walker Evans”). His work was formed like a collection, a gathering of discontinuous and fragmented images and individuals (Cartier-Bresson 39). Perhaps in doing so, he was compelled to contemplate the confusing and disorganized state of the nation at the time. Evans would mindfully ignore picturesque images, instead paying close attention to building a collection of portraits and images of the bright signs on Broadway (Mellow 130).