Although he resisted the term "art photographer" throughout his life, Walker Evans was instrumental in establishing photography as an artistic profession in the United States.
Although he resisted the term "art photographer" throughout his life, Walker Evans was instrumental in establishing photography as an artistic profession in the United States. Ten years after making his first serious photographs, Evans had published three books with noted writers and had as many one-person shows at the Museum of Modern Art. The last of these, American Photographs (1938), established a lineage, characterized by the ironic documentation of this country's sights and mores, that was later furthered by Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, and other photographers in the postwar decades.