American photographer, the most formally influential documentary photographer of the twentieth century and, with Dorothea Lange, the principal visual recorder of Depression-era American poverty; the photographer whose work — particularly the Alabama tenant-farmer portraits made with James Agee for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) — established the paradox that has occupied every subsequent photographer of poverty: that an image of suffering can also be a beautiful object, and that this fact is a problem rather than a solution.
Evans was born in St. Louis, raised in the suburbs of Chicago and New York, attended Williams College for a year, spent a year in Paris hoping to become a writer, and returned to New York in 1928, turning to photography. By the early 1930s he had developed the style that would define his career: frontal, deadpan, uninflected, preferring the vernacular American landscape — storefronts, clapboard churches, hand-painted signs, billboards, license plates, the unlovely ordinary — to the dramatic compositions and spectacular landscapes of the Stieglitz circle. The frontality and the refusal of drama were the point: Evans wanted the subject to present itself, not to be "seen" by the photographer's eye. The method has a moral claim embedded in it, though Evans would have denied the word.
From 1935 to 1937 Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration, producing the photographs for which he is best known: the Alabama tenant-farmer portraits (Allie Mae Burroughs, Floyd Burroughs, the Gudger and Ricketts and Woods families) that became, with Agee's prose, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The book — part documentary, part prose-poetry, part agonized meditation on the ethics of representing other people's poverty — was a commercial failure in 1941 and a rediscovered classic by the 1960s. Evans's portraits are its visual center: frontal, unsparing, dignifying — the subjects look directly at the camera, and the camera does not flinch or beautify.
Evans left the FSA in 1937, produced American Photographs (1938) for the Museum of Modern Art — the first one-person photography exhibition at MoMA, and a landmark in the museum legitimation of photography as art — and from 1945 to 1965 worked as a staff photographer and editor at Fortune magazine, where he produced photo-essays on American vernacular design, tools, and industrial landscapes. He taught at Yale from 1965 to 1974. His late work experimented with Polaroid SX-70 prints.
Susan Sontag's On Photography engages Evans repeatedly, and his influence on subsequent American photography — Robert Frank's The Americans, William Eggleston's color work, Stephen Shore, the "New Topographics" movement — is the largest of any single American photographer.
Evans is on the graph because the ethical question his work poses — what does it mean to make beautiful images of poverty? — is at the center of the graph's concerns with inequality, documentary witness, and the politics of representation, and because Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is one of the foundational texts of American social documentary.