Capturing America: : Through the Lens of Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Eudora Welty

Walker Evans Biography Born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1903, photographer Walker Evans took up photography in 1928.

Walker Evans is best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration of the U.S. Department of the Interior documenting the effects of The Great Depression. His focus was the government-run resettlement community that housed unemployed West Virginia coal miners.

Much of Walker Evans' change to photography from the FSA period in 1935-36 uses the large-format, 8x10-inch camera. His goal was to show Americans how the government was helping fix the myriad of problems associated with poverty during The... View artist page

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Ben Shahn Biography Ben Shahn (1898-1969) is renowned as one of the leading American artists of the Social Realist movement in the mid-twentieth century. Shahn originally began his career as a painter, lithographer, and muralist, but it was his foray into photography during the Great Depression that cemented his artistic legacy in American history. Shahn’s striking photographs from the 1930s confront viewers with an incisive commentary on poverty, injustice, and mass unemployment in rural farming communities across America. Aligning with his realist style, Ben Shahn’s Depression-era pictures showed life as it was, not as his subjects or viewers wished it... View artist page

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