"At the heart of this book lies the work of the great American photographer Walker Evans, who radically expanded the possibilities of photography as an art. Photographers before Evans had certainly conceived of their pictures as art, but in order to make that claim they had most often aimed at a cultivated visual style that would advertise its differences from the vast mass of reportorial and vernacular photography.

Evan's work of the late 1920s and 1930s, however, was direct and plainspoken, conclusively demonstrating how richly articulate and challenging a photograph could become by affecting no more than a hard, clear, observant gaze at the world beyond the lens.".

"Evans is the moving force of Walker Evans & Company, but the book, which presents over 300 works, in photography and other mediums, by over 100 artists, has a larger subject: it is a generously expansive study of a diverse, long-lived visual tradition. Beginning with the great influences on Evans - American vernacular photography, and the work of the Europeans Eugene Atget and August Sander - Peter Galassi goes on to chart Evan's own influence on later generations of artists.

That influence may be direct, or roundabout; it may also be a question less of a definite lineage than of a general inheritance, a shared focus of interest or mode of approach."--BOOK JACKET.