Walker Evans was a notoriously surly man who spent his life “fixing the present in its irrevocable time.”

While being cynical and cruel to his friends and acquaintances - including the equally salty Ernest Hemingway - Evans was able to put aside his inherent nastiness to document the American vernacular with absolute humanity.

Evans’s road to becoming one of America’s most prolific photographers began in St. Louis, Missouri in November of 1903. It took Evans a mere fourteen years to develop an interest in photography that would change the art world. He took just slightly longer to develop his unique, vernacular style, an “evocative but more reticent [notion] of realism, of [the] spectator’s role and poetic resonance of ordinary subjects.”

Evans’s fascination with the vernacular thrived when he got a job with the Department of the Interior in 1935 photographing the government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. This oddly specific photography gig led Evans to a full-time position as an “information specialist” in the New Deal agency, the Resettlement Administration. He was tasked with documenting small town life and the government's attempts to improve rural communities during the Great Depression. The federal government gave Evans the means to wander around and invade the personal tragedy of American life during the Great Depression, and this produced some of his best known images, all of which had journalistically lengthy names, like Roadside Stand Near Birmingham and Roadside Store Between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, Alabama. His fame rose as he continued to photograph roadside stands, cheap cafes, and small town streets.

After being officially tasked with documenting American life, urban and rural, affluent and impoverished, Evans took this task a step closer to stalking the American public. Between 1938 and 1941, Evans decided to embark on the enterprise of photographing the New York City subway system. By hiding a camera under his coat with the lens peeking out between two buttons, Evans created authentic portraits surreptitiously and at a very close range. He believed this was the truest way to photograph, “[the] guard is down and the mask is off… people’s faces are in naked repose down in the subway.” A bit creepy, but as all underground commuters know, not entirely untrue.

Evans is one of the best known photographers in the world, whether you know his name or his pictures. However, his images are less individual portraits of a suffering public and more a series of reflections of the spirit and fortitude of a nation to endure tragedy. Despite himself, despite his bureaucratic task, Evans created a visual meme that still moves and informs us. Evans died in 1975 leaving a legacy of subverting traditional photography, much like what Marcel Duchamp did to sculpture, and reflecting the normative nature of the daily human struggle.