When it comes to Realism, another photographer who fits into this movement is Walker Evans, a photographer who documented families during the Great Depression in America. Evans is one of the photographers who I am looking at for the theme of family, as he focused on families for most of his images. Walker Evans was a photographer who was best known for his work during the Great Depression, and how his documentary images brought light to the struggles of family life within small towns in America. Most of his images appear to be candid, although there are a few portraits here and there within his work. One of his prime influences was August Sander, a German portrait and documentary photographer, and has been described as the most important German portrait photographer of the early twentieth century.

The image above is from his series Cotton Tenants, where he photographed three families in Hale County, Alabama, America. In this black and white image you can see a family of five and a dog standing on what looks likes a front porch. By the worn down clothes they are wearing and the poor state of the building they stand by, you can assume that they are a working class family and are struggling with poverty. You are immediately drawn to the man standing in the middle of the image, in front of the rest of his family. This may have been done on purpose to represent his importance to the family as the typical ‘bread-winner’, as during this era it was the husband who worked while the wife and children stayed at home.

The Great Depression was the worst economic downfall that has happened in American history. The stock market crash in October 1929 was the beginning of the Great Depression, and due to this by 1933 unemployment was at 25% and more than 5000 banks had gone out of business. The average family income during this time was $1,500, 40% less than what families usually earned before the start of the economic downfall, in turn leaving families stressed with just under half of their usual income gone. For his series ‘Cotton Tenants : Three Families’, Walker Evans photographed three families who were struggling with poverty to capture the effects of the Great Depression in Hale County, Alabama, and to expose the effects of this to the world. The people in the image above was one of the many families in that area who were facing destitution due to the economical decline during that era. At the time Evans photographed these three families, it was the height of the Great Depression and this was the time where people were finding it the hardest to cope. You can clearly see the effects it had on this family – they wouldn’t have been able to afford clean clothes, as portrayed by the rags they wore, nutritious food or the right equipment to fix and clean their house. – unfinished