Walker Evans’ iconic pictures of poverty-stricken rural communities in 1930s America have sometimes led to him being seen as mainly a photographer of the Great Depression. However, these pictures only represented a very small part of his lifetime’s output, which included landscapes, portraits and still life.
Forty years after his death, it’s particularly his pictures documenting everyday aspects of American life – road signs, advertising hoardings, garages, shop fronts, churches and people riding on the New York subway – that have been most influential.
Major photographers, from Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander to Bernd and Hilla Becher, have all been directly inspired by different aspects of his work. They, in turn, have influenced the generation of photographers who followed, including Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff. So what was…
