Walker Evans Depth of Field

Walker Evans: Depth of Field is a 2015 book on the American photographer Walker Evans, edited by John T. Hill, the executor of Evans's estate, and the critic Heinz Liesbrock.

Published by Prestel, the 408-page volume was compiled by Hill. He had taught alongside Evans on the Yale faculty in the 1960s and 70s and was named executor of Evans's estate three years before Evans died in 1975. Since then, Hill has worked to widen how Evans's photography is read, past its early reputation as a record of the Depression-era rural South.

Evans (1903-1975) made his name with photographs taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression. These were later paired with James Agee's text in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), an account of three tenant-farming families in Hale County, Alabama. He worked in a spare, direct documentary style influenced by Eugène Atget and August Sander. His photographs are held in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the George Eastman Museum, among others.