After studying at Williams College (Massachusetts) and the Sorbonne, Walker Evans took his first photographs, of Manhattan life, in the late 1920s. In 1934, he started working with Fortune magazine; then the Farm Security Administration hired him, like Dorothea Lange, to document the impact of the Great Depression. His work became famous and marked the history of photography. In 1948, Evans was appointed picture editor at Fortune, a position he held for 17 years, allowing him to deepen his analysis of the relationship between words and images. There have been many monographic exhibitions of his work around the world, notably at New York’s MoMA, which devoted a major retrospective to him in 1971.