An American photographer, Walker Evans (1903-1975) was best known for his photographs of American life between the world wars. Everyday objects and people--the urban and rural poor, abandoned buildings, storefronts, street signs, and the like--are encapsulated in his laconic images of the 1930s and 1940s.

Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on November 3, 1903. His family moved to Toledo, Ohio, shortly after his birth but eventually settled in Kenilworth, Illinois, a well-to-do suburb of Chicago, where his father worked as a successful member of an advertising firm. Walker attended several private schools, graduating in 1922 from Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, with the ambition to become a writer. He attended Williams College but dropped out after his freshman year.

With an allowance from his father, Evans in 1926 moved to Paris, along with other hopeful American expatriot writers bent on absorbing the artistic and intellectual climate of avant-garde postwar Europe...