Decade by Decade

Decade by Decade is a Hatje Cantz monograph that covers the whole of Walker Evans's career, including the decades after the Depression-era work he is best known for.

James Crump, curator of photography at the Cincinnati Art Museum, wrote the text. The publishers note that Evans's images of Depression-era poverty, made for the Farm Security Administration, have drawn far more attention than the work of later decades. This book gives the later work room, with many photographs that are rarely seen, among them the Polaroids he made in the early 1970s, his last images. It also follows Evans's growing influence in that decade and his relationship with John Szarkowski, the Museum of Modern Art curator. An exhibition ran at the Cincinnati Art Museum from 12 June to 5 September 2010. Hatje Cantz published an English edition in 2010 and a German-English edition in 2012, which went with a showing at Die Photographische Sammlung in Cologne.

Evans (1903-1975) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and took up photography in 1928. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), his book with the writer James Agee, followed three white tenant families in southern Alabama. He worked on the staff of Time from 1945, then at Fortune until 1965, when he began teaching photography at the Yale University School of Art.