America’s infatuation with photography has thrived upon its easy accessibility. By 1903, the year Walker Evans was born, George Eastman had made the roll-film camera so cheap that soon no family reunion or Sunday picnic need ever lack a “photo artist” to immortalize it. Amateur camera societies and photo exhibitions sprang up in cities and towns from coast to coast. And while professionals like Alfred Stieglitz fought for “the serious recognition of photography as an additional medium of pictorial expression,” arguing that the photographer’s gift, like the painter’s, was privileged vision, the larger public remained quite content with the belief that one person’s photo was pretty much as good as another’s.

It would be Walker Evans’s destiny, in a career that spanned five decades, to settle the question of “privileged vision” once and for all. That he did so while choosing as his greatest subjects the poor, the disenfranchised and their “vernacular” surroundings, presents one of the richest paradoxes in our cultural history.

By the time Walker Evans, Jr. sent his son, Walker Evans III, to Europe to study French literature in 1926, no American abroad felt properly accoutred without a camera. And the dapper young Evans was never a man to be less than perfectly turned out. With his pocket camera he took a few photos, on a lark. He shot a picture of a grim-lipped soldier in the classical Palazzo Royale, Naples. The man is amusingly juxtaposed with a fanciful four-lanterned street lamp that