Walker Evans: Labor Anonymous

Walker Evans (1903-1975) remains one of the most important and influential photographers in the history of the medium. His career spanned the emergence of the modern mass media in the 1920s to the full acceptance of photography as an art form in the 1960s and 70s. Many of Evans’s individual images have become landmarks in both the history of photography and the social history of that era. Without Evans the development of photography would have been very different, particularly in North America. Where the mass media enjoyed celebrity culture, Evans photographed anonymous citizens. Where the mass media promoted consumerism, Evans valued enduring objects and the persistence of the past in the present. Experimental and yet classical, Evans’s photo-essays have been overlooked until recently. Evans’s series ‘Labor Anonymous’, published in Fortune magazine in November 1946, displayed pictures of walking workers, taken against a featureless wall, on a Saturday afternoon in Detroit. This book presents fifty hitherto unpublished photos from this classic series.

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