Walker Evans (1903-75), whose work is currently (2000) on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, was an American photographer who produced some remarkable images, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s. He is perhaps best known, rightly or wrongly, for a series of photographs he took of tenant farm families in Hale County, Alabama in 1936. Of those probably the most famous are several 8 x 10 portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs, dark hair pulled back, tightlipped, against unpainted wooden clapboards. There are not many other photos one can think of that “stand” for a moment in history and are so widely assumed to have summed up the situation of a suffering population as these do.
Link: AMERICANSUBURB X: THEORY: “Walker Evans and Photography (2000)”