Walker Evans: Labor Anonymous

Join David Campany and Jerry L. Thompson in conversation on the newly released D.A.P./Koenig book Walker Evans: Labor Anonymous. Campany and Thompson will discuss this crucial project within Evans’ oeuvre, as well as its significance as a long-vanished piece of American history. A book signing will follow.

Walker Evans shot the photographs collected in Labor Anonymous as an assignment for Fortune, which published a small selection of twenty images in its November 1946 issue, under the title “On a Saturday Afternoon in Detroit.” Until now, however, the stunning series of fifty photographs has never been reproduced in its entirety. This book compiles the photographs, contact sheets, small-version printlets, Evans’ annotations to newspaper clippings, drafts for an unpublished text, telegrams and every available print Evans made, along with the Fortune spread as published. Essays by David Campany, Jerry L. Thompson, and Heinz Liesbrock are also included in the book.

David Campany (born in Essex, 1967) is a writer, curator, and artist. He teaches photographic theory and practice at the University of Westminster, London. His books include: The Open Road: Photography and the American Roadtrip (Aperture, 2014), Walker Evans: The Magazine Work (Steidl, 2014), and Jeff Wall: Picture for Women (Afterall/MIT Press, 2010). He also writes for Frieze, Aperture, Art Review, FOAM, Source, Photoworks, and Tate Etc.

Jerry L. Thompson (born in Texas, 1945) is a working photographer who also writes about photography. He worked as Walker Evans’s principal assistant from 1973 until Evans’s death in 1975. He is the author of The Last Years of Walker Evans and Truth and Photography.