Quotes About Walker Evans

The great photographers of life - like Diane Arbus and Walker Evans and Robert Frank - all must have had some special quality: a personality of nurturing and non-judgment that frees the subjects to reveal their most intimate reality. It really is what makes a great photographer, every bit as much as understanding composition and lighting.

While I began writing 'Rules of Civility' in 2006, the genesis of the book dates back to the early 1990s, when I happened upon a copy of 'Many Are Called,' the collection of portraits that Walker Evans took on the New York City subways in the late 1930s with a hidden camera.

Walker Evans said it was 'a pet subject' of his — how writers like James Joyce and Henry James were 'unconscious photographers'.

I was born in Seoul, South Korea; then I moved to New York City at the age of seventeen. In New York, I studied art and photography. I thought I would be a painter; then I saw Walker Evans when I was in college, and that had a great impact on me. Being in the darkroom making B&W prints was such a magical experience.