Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975), born in St. Louis, Missouri, began his photographic career at age 25. His studies of Victorian architecture and his photographs of the rural South during the Great Depression, made for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), are among his best-known works. Many of Evans's photographs of tenant farmers appeared in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, with text by James Agee). His direct, unobtrusive, purist approach emphasizes the dignity of his subjects—at the same time exposing both their beauty and the obscenity of the social conditions in which their beauty grew. Evans was an accomplished academic as well; he and served as an editor for both Fortune and Time and was a professor of graphic arts at Yale.