Walker Evans: Depth of Field
October 29, 2016 - January 22, 2017
Walker Evans
Citizen in Downtown Havana, 1933
silver gelatin print
Private Collection
The American photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) is among the most influential artists of the 20th century. Covering the full arc of his career, Walker Evans: Depth of Field presents the most comprehensive look at Evans’ work ever mounted in Canada.
Co-organized by the Josef Albers Museum Quaddrat and the High Museum of Art, in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery, the exhibition features more than 200 black and white and colour prints from the 1920s through to the 1970s, including the iconic images Evans made in the American South during the Great Depression—work that played a major role in forging the idiom we now refer to as documentary photography. The exhibition and its companion publication explore the transatlantic roots and repercussions of Evans’ contribution to the field of photography and examine his development of a lyrical documentary style, in which a powerful personal perspective is fused with a rigorously detailed depiction of time and place.
Organized by the Josef Albers Museum Quaddrat, Bottrop, Germany and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, in collaboration with the Vancouver Art Gallery
Walker Evans
Roadside Sign near Birmingham, Alabama, 1936
silver gelatin print
Private collectionWalker Evans
Junk Yard Truck, Grill, West Lyme, Connecticut, 1973–75
ink jet print
Private CollectionWalker Evans
Tin snips, by J. Wiss & Sons Co., $1.85, 1955
ink jet print
Private Collection
Miles, Maureen and Larry Lunn
The Wesik Family
Christopher and Tara Poseley
Publication
Walker Evans: Depth of Field
Co-published by the Josef Albers Museum Bottrop and High Museum of Art Atlanta in partnership with the Vancouver Art Gallery
November 2015
Hardcover, 408 pages
Illustrations: 400 black & white, 25 colour
Editors: John T. Hill and Heinz Liesbrock
The American photographer Walker Evans shaped the history of 20th-century photography like no other. Born in 1903, he studied literature at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1920s, where he became increasingly interested in European photography. After returning to the United States, Evans began to realize that the artistic material he was looking for was right in front of him—on the streets and in middle-class apartments. Walker Evans: Depth of Field collects more than 400 images from the photographer’s oeuvre, from his famous depression–era Farm Security Administration images to his later colour works, alongside essays from three of Evans’ friends, the photographers John T. Hill and Jerry Thompson and former Yale professor Alan Trachtenberg.