American photographer whose influence on the evolution of ambitious photography (photography, history of) during the second half of the 20th century was perhaps greater than that of any other figure. He rejected the prevailing, highly aestheticized view of artistic photography, of which Alfred Stieglitz (Stieglitz, Alfred) was the most visible proponent, and constructed instead an artistic strategy based on the poetic resonance of common but exemplary facts, clearly described. His most characteristic pictures show quotidian American life during the second quarter of the century, especially through the description of its vernacular architecture, its outdoor advertising, the beginnings of its automobile culture, and its domestic interiors.

Evans spent much of his childhood in the Chicago suburb of Kenilworth, before moving several times and attending a series of secondary schools that culminated at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachussetts. His academic record was spotty at best, and it did not improve at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, which he left after only one year.

After leaving college, Evans spent three years in New York City working at dead-end jobs. In 1926 his father, an advertising executive, offered to finance the continuation of his education in Paris, and so Evans spent a year in France, where he audited classes at the Sorbonne and tried to write (with very limited success). On his return to New York in the spring of 1927, Evans lived the life of a writer in Greenwich Village—albeit a writer with writer's block and no significant publication record. Although he had made some casual snapshots in France, his serious interest in photography seems to have developed, at first tentatively, during this period.

In 1928 and 1929 Evans made a substantial number of photographs that unmistakably indicate artistic ambition. Most of these depict semiabstract patterns derived from skyscrapers or other machine-age products. However, in the fall of 1929 he became interested in the work of the French photographer Eugène Atget (Atget, Eugène), who eschewed deliberately artistic effects in his simple, economic photographs of Paris and its environs at the turn of the 20th century. The photographer Berenice Abbott (Abbott, Berenice), the most dedicated supporter of Atget's work, had acquired his residual estate of prints and plates and brought the collection to New York. Evans's friend James Stern remembered—almost half a century later—that he and Evans had gone to Abbott's apartment to see Atget's work, perhaps for the first time in America. Stern said that in Evans he had caught the glimpse of an obsession, causing him to ask, “Surely it is not invidious to ask what kind of Evans we would have, which way his art would have developed, had there never been an Atget?”

Near the end of his life, Evans would say that seeing Atget confirmed a new direction that was in fact already taking place in his work, and there is no reason to challenge this formulation. Nevertheless, it would seem that during the early 1930s Evans virtually worked his way through the Atget catalog, applying its lessons to the very different raw material offered by his own country. Evans's unswerving commitment to a direct and unsentimental style, free of dramatic vantage points and romantic glints and shadows, was a commitment to an art that concealed its art. On the level of style, his work might have been mistaken for that of a skilled if literal-minded commercial photographer. Evans's idea of artistic style was expressed by Gustave Flaubert (Flaubert, Gustave)'s maxim that an artist should be “like God in Creation…he should be everywhere felt, but nowhere seen.”

In 1938 the Museum of Modern Art (Modern Art, Museum of) in New York City published American Photographs to accompany a retrospective exhibition of Evans's work to that time. The book's 87 pictures were made between 1929 and 1936 and selected by Evans. It is remarkable that more than a third of the pictures were made during the brief but astonishingly productive 18 months when Evans was employed by the FSA. American Photographs, with a critical essay by Lincoln Kirstein (Kirstein, Lincoln), remains perhaps the most influential photography book of the modern era.

In contrast to the aggressive intrusiveness that even in the 1930s characterized much photographic reportage, Evans's pictures from this project exhibit an almost courtly reticence to intrude into the most private aspects of his subjects' lives. And yet, in spite of the absence of vulgar prying, the viewer thinks he knows the so-called Ricketts, Woods, and Gudgers better than any star in the tabloids, perhaps partly because they seem collaborators in the design of their portraits. Perhaps Evans understood that the meagre thinness of the sharecroppers' lives was rendered most clearly when they had dressed themselves up in their Sunday best.

During the 1940 and '50s—the heyday of photojournalism in the magazines—Evans, with his prickly, superior intelligence and jealously guarded independence, was not a useful role model for most working photographers. Yet, as the promise of the magazines began to lose its lustre, Evans increasingly became a hero to younger photographers who were not comfortable as part of an editorial team. Robert Frank (Frank, Robert), Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus (Arbus, Diane), and Lee Friedlander are among the most significant later photographers who have acknowledged their debt to Evans. His influence on artists in fields other than photography has also been great.