Between 1945 and 1965 Walker Evans was employed by Time Inc. to work for Fortune, the American business and industry magazine. He advised on its photographic direction and produced his own photo-essays, often setting his own assignments, shooting, editing, designing, and writing too. Evans’s complex politics and artistic temperament were at odds with American magazine culture. Many of his photo-essays resisted Fortune’s preference for business, industry, and modern capitalist progress. Instead he celebrated the outmoded, the disappearing, and the overlooked. His layouts and texts often faced the viewer with the ambiguities of photographs as documents. As well as shooting his own projects he worked with archival and vernacular images such as popular postcards. This essay explores three of Evans’s pieces for Fortune: ‘Labor Anonymous’ (1946), ‘Main Street Looking North from Courthouse Square’ (1948) and ‘Homes for Americans’ (1946). As Evans’s ‘museum’ reputation grew in the 1960s and 1970s, his magazine work was forgotten or dismissed as compromised commercialism. The author revisits those pages to show just how seriously Evans took them
