Walker Evans: The Lost Work

Walker Evans was perhaps the greatest "documentary artist" American has ever known. In a career that lasted forty-six years (1928-1974) Evans profoundly changed the way Americans looked at themselves, their social causes, and their country. Drawn from a largely unseen private collection-the largest private collection of Walker Evans photographs in the world-this lavishly produced volume publishes here for the first time scores of pictures that have henceforth been inaccessible to the public. Included are the familiar images of Evans's Southern work (1935-36), as well as far less familiar images of Evans's friends and fellow artists, his work in Tahiti, photographs that he made of Victorian House architecture (1930-31), and photographs done on travels to England, Cuba, Maine, Nova Scotia, Chicago and New Orleans. Authors Belinda Rathbone and Clark Worswick rise to the occasion of documenting Evans' monumental career, exploring the overlooked byways of Evans' career at a moment when a rediscovery of his life's work is taking place in both the museum world and in the world of photographic collecting. What we are presented with here is a definitive and sometimes surprising look at the photographer whose oeuvre prefigures the work of photographers and documentary artists of all stripes.

Belinda Rathbone is a photography historian who has written widely on modern photographers. In her definitive biography, Walker Evans (1995), Rathbone interviewed more than a hundred friends and colleagues of Evans's as well as his two former wives, and combed archives and letters to illuminate his singular vision and complex personality Evans carefully withheld from his photographs. Her research papers are now part of the Walker Evans Archive at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.