American photographer and journalist Walker Evans was BOTD in 1903. Born in St Louis, Missouri to an affluent middle-class family, he studied at Williams College in Massachusetts before dropping out and moving to New York City. After a sojourn in Paris, he returned to New York, befriending a largely gay artistic circle including art critic Lincoln Kirstein, writers Hart Crane, James Agee and John Cheever and and composer Samuel Barber. He took up photography in the 1920s, travelling to Cuba to document the Machado dictatorship and befriending Ernest Hemingway. In 1936, during the height of the Great Depression, he and Evans spent six weeks interviewing and photographing Alabama sharecroppers. Their collected material formed the basis of the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, featuring Walker’s photos alongside Agee’s lyrical reflections on the plight of the poor. Alongside his contemporary Dorothea Lange, Evans’ work eloquently essayed the brutality of industrial America and rural poverty, admired for his austere composition and direct emotional connection with his subjects. In 1938, he became the first photographer to have a solo exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art. In his later years he worked as a staff writer for Time magazine and taught photography at Yale. Evans had affairs with men and women, eventually marrying his mistress Jane Ninas in 1941. He is also thought to have had an affair with Cheever, and invited Agee into a mènage-a-trois with Ninas. He died in 1975, aged 71.