Walker Evans. Now and Then

In 2009, Fundación MAPFRE inaugurated its photography program with a retrospective devoted to Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri, 1903–New Haven, Connecticut, 1975). Today, sixteen years later, the institution offers a new reading of the work of this major artist and shows how his oeuvre continues to resonate with remarkable relevance. One of the qualities that lends significance to Walker Evans’s work—and that has undoubtedly contributed to making him one of the most influential figures on the international scene—is his reflective attitude toward the photographic medium. This stance distanced him from a theatrical or contrived approach in favor of one that was sincere, analytical, and deeply lyrical, a dimension directly linked to the artist’s concern for the context in which his images were conceived.

Walker Evans began working with photography in the 1920s, and over the course of his extensive career, which spanned more than fifty years, he produced some of the most iconic images in the history of the medium. He explored a wide range of subjects, from furtively taken street photographs to meticulous and precise studies of architecture, although for many years his best-known works were those he made in the American South beginning in 1930. Evans also embraced new artistic and technical developments, and toward the end of his life he explored the possibilities offered by the Polaroid camera. What unified his entire production was a profound interest in—and affection for—the appearance and essence of everyday life in a society increasingly obsessed with the new and the immediate.

Curator: David Campany

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