Walker Evans was a photographer and photo journalist who is best known for his work for the Farm security Administration during the Great Depression. Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri on November 3, 1903. Most of his younger years were spent in Toledo, Chicago and New York city. He attended the Loomis institute in Windsor, Connecticut, The Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania, and the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts for his 9-12 grade years. He attended Williams College, a liberal Arts college in Massachusetts, for a year before dropping out. Evans took up Photography in 1928. In 1933, he was sent to Cuba on assignment to take pictures about the dictatorship of  Gerardo Machado. In 1935, Evans started work for the Resettlement Administration, and then The FSA. While working for the FSA, Evans documented life during the Great Depression. He would take pictures to show rural poverty and was even acclaimed for his photos of sharecroppers. He worked for the FSA until 1938, and in that same year had his own exhibition called Walker Evans: American Photographs at the museum of Modern Art in New York. Evans would later become a staff writer at time Magazine. He died in 1975 at his home in Connecticut.

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Walker Evans was best known for his street photography during the Depression era, his style often being called direct and unsentimental, due to its lack of dramatic vantage points and romantic glints and shadows. His influences were Eugene Atget, a French photographer who took pictures of France and its economic environment. These appear in Evans work through his show of his surrounding environment, particularly in impoverished areas. His other influence was August Sander among others. His contributions to the general public and the photography of the world is his showing of the impoverished during the depression. He helped the public recognize the people who work hard and can still barely afford to live. He influenced photography by his use of street photography over setup photography.