Walker Evans

Evans called his approach the documentary style: a camera on a tripod, square to a building, a sign or a sharecropper's kitchen, with no dramatic angles and no comment, so that hand-painted shop signs, front porches and Main Streets speak for themselves. His work for the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and his collaboration with the writer James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, about three tenant families in Alabama, show it at its best. The families' cooperation, often uneasy, is part of that book's story.