Evans was born in St. Louis in 1903 and started taking architectural, abstract photos while studying in Paris in 1926. Within a year of moving to New York, Hill said, the self-taught photographer was making “remarkably mature” street portraits with a Leica, whose quality rivaled those of French master Henri Cartier-Bresson. By the early 1930s, Evans had adopted a straightforward documentary style, which characterized his famous FSA photos recording the impacts of the Great Depression. This, like most of his work, was the result of a paid assignment. “Evans had no fear of being tainted by commercial work. He knew that once he had been given an assignment that he could shape it to satisfy his own artistic sense. For me, this is one of Evans’ claims to genius—that was knowing that he could have the work on his own terms,” Hill said. After he left the FSA in 1938, Evans gave up his 8-by-10 large-format camera for a while and began trying other cameras and techniques. One of his most successful experiments came when he took a concealed 35 mm camera into the New York City subway system and photographed anonymous portraits without looking through the viewfinder. It was an approach he’d use again for other projects, including a series, “Labor Anonymous,” on workers in Detroit for Fortune magazine. His last major body of work, in the 1970s, was made with a Polaroid SX-70, which demonstrated his interest in exploring color and nonprofessional camera technology. [http://www.slate.com/blogs/behold/2016/01/12/the_work_of_walker_evans_is_collected_in_the_book_walker_evans_depth_of.html]