Evans is the progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography. In the summer of 1936, he traveled to the South with his friend, the writer James Agee, who had been assigned to write an article on tenant farmers by Fortune magazine. His photographs from this collaboration are stunningly honest representations of the faces, bedrooms, and clothing of individual farmers living on a dry hillside 17 miles north of Greensboro, Alabama. As a series, they seem to have elucidated the whole tragedy of the Great Depression; individually, they are intimate, transcendent and enigmatic. For many, they are the apogee of his career in photography.—The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
