HISTORY OF ART & DESIGN STYLES: FROM C 1900 -. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, his principal subject was the vernacular - the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafes, advertisements and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic...

On assignment for "Fortune" magazine in 1936, Agee and Evans set out to explore the plight of sharecroppers during the Great Depression. Published for the first time, Agee's original dispatch (accompanied by 25 of Evans' historic photographs) is an unsparing record of three families at a desperate time.

"The photographs of Walker Evans (1903-1975) altered the American consciousness; many of his images are fixed in our collective memory. His uncompromising documentation of poverty during the Great Depression is iconic in the history of photography, yet his equally innovative works produced in the ensuing decades have been little known and underappreciated. This monograph, spanning all of Evans's work, presents many photographs that are only rarely...

"At the heart of this book lies the work of the great American photographer Walker Evans, who radically expanded the possibilities of photography as an art. Photographers before Evans had certainly conceived of their pictures as art, but in order to make that claim they had most often aimed at a cultivated visual style that would advertise its differences from the vast mass of reportorial and vernacular photography. Evan's work of the late 1920s and...