MINNEAPOLIS.- The work of celebrated American photographer Walker Evans is now on view in a new exhibition at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. “Walker Evans” presents for the first time more than seventy images drawn entirely from the Institute’s holdings, which boasts one of the country’s leading collections of Walker Evans material. On view through September 14, “Walker Evans” is organized by the Department of Photographs at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. A fully illustrated catalogue of the Institute’s collection of Walker Evans photographs accompanies the exhibition. Covering a career that lasted more than fifty years, the exhibition includes examples of every major body of work that Walker Evans executed on black-and-white film. The subjects range from images Evans photographed while on assignment in  Cuba in the early 1930s to his better-known prints taken during the Great Depression and later portraits of everyday life photographed in the 1960s. Also on view are iconic images, such as the 1936 portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper’s wife in Alabama, as well as the subway portraits taken surreptitiously in New York City.

Born in 1903, Walker Evans seriously took up photography in the late 1920s. Wandering the streets of New York City, he captured people in a straightforward manner that reflected the harsh, gritty atmosphere of the metropolis. At the same time, he aimed his small-format camera upward at the city’s bridges and skyscrapers, creating formal and abstract compositions reminiscent of European modernism. Between 1935 and 1937, Evans produced his most accomplished and recognized images while employed by the Farm Security Administration of the United States Government. During this time Evans traveled from Pennsylvania down to the southern states and recorded the plight of the rural poor. The pictures he took in Alabama in the summer of 1936 became the photographic basis for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a project embarked upon with writer James Agee that explored the extreme poverty of three tenant farming families. Evans continued working as a freelance photographer until the mid 1940s, when he joined the staff of Fortune magazine. He later taught at Yale University and returned to his personal photographic work. Evans died of a stroke in New Haven, Connecticut, on April 10, 1975.

Thanks to key acquisitions by curator Carroll T. Hartwell, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is one of few institutions in the United States with such a comprehensive and significant collection of Walker Evans prints. The first purchases were made in 1975 when the art market for photography was in its infancy. Hartwell was able to acquire forty-three vintage prints. In subsequent years, additional prints came into the museum’s collection, with the latest added in 2003. Altogether, the Institute possesses nearly one hundred photographs by Walker Evans, representing almost every aspect of his artistic output. The Walker Evans material at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is of such high quality that it has become one of the most respected collections of the photographer’s work in the world.

“Walker Evans” runs May 10 through September 14, 2003. Admission is free.