Walker Evans valuation

Walker Evans (1903–1975) was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, spent a year in Paris in 1926 and returned to New York to take up photography. He is known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration, which documented the effects of the Great Depression, much of it made with an 8 × 10 inch view camera. Walker Evans: American Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 was the museum's first exhibition devoted to a single photographer. In the summer of 1936 he went to Hale County, Alabama, with the writer James Agee on an assignment for Fortune, and the results were published in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. He later became a professor of photography at Yale.

What comes to market is gelatin silver prints from across his career, along with his late colour Polaroids. Prints made close to the date of the negative are treated differently from later ones, and his Farm Security Administration negatives are held by the Library of Congress and can be printed by anyone, so a buyer will want to know when and by whom a print was made and what stamps it carries. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds the Walker Evans Archive. Prints should be checked for silvering, creases and staining from old mounts.