Walker Evans (November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975) was an American photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans' New Deal work uses the large format, 8 × 10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, transcendent".

Many of his works are in the permanent collections of museums and have been the subject of retrospectives at such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the George Eastman Museum.

Walker Evans was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to Jessie (née Crane) and Walker Evans. His father was an advertising director. Walker was raised in an affluent environment; he spent his youth in Toledo, Ohio; Chicago; and New York City. He attended the Loomis Institute and Mercersburg Academy, then graduated from Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1922. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College, spending much of his time in the school's library before dropping out. He returned to New York City and worked as a night attendant in the map room of the Public Library. After spending a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to the United States to join a literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, and Lincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm on Wall Street from 1927 to 1929.

Evans took up photography in 1928 around the time he was living in Ossining, New York. His influences included Eugène Atget and August Sander. In 1930, he published three photographs (Brooklyn Bridge) in the poetry book The Bridge by Hart Crane. In 1931, he made a photo series of Victorian houses in the Boston vicinity sponsored by Lincoln Kirstein.

In May and June 1933, Evans took photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals' The Crime of Cuba (1933), a "strident account" of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. There, Evans drank nightly with Ernest Hemingway, who lent him money to extend his two-week stay an additional week. His photographs documented street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes. He also helped Hemingway acquire photos from newspaper archives that documented some of the political violence Hemingway described in To Have and Have Not (1937). Fearing that his photographs might be deemed critical of the government and confiscated by Cuban authorities, he left 46 prints with Hemingway. He had no difficulties when returning to the United States, and 31 of his photos appeared in Beals' book. The cache of prints left with Hemingway was discovered in Havana in 2002 and exhibited at an exhibition in Key West.

The Great Depression years of 1935–36 were a period of remarkable productivity and accomplishment for Evans. In 1935, Evans spent two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania. In June 1935, he accepted a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlayed this temporary employment into a full-time position as an "information specialist" in the Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration), a New Deal agency in the Department of Agriculture. From October 1935 on, he continued to do photographic work for the RA and later the Farm Security Administration (FSA), primarily in the Southern United States. In November 1935, he visited the industrial hub of the Lehigh Valley in eastern Pennsylvania, capturing photos of Bethlehem Steel. His photograph, Bethlehem Graveyard and Steel Mill, which captured Bethlehem's St. Michael's Cemetery in the foreground and Bethlehem Steel's smokestacks in the background ranks among his best known.

In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, writer James Agee and he were sent by Fortune on assignment to Hale County, Alabama for a story the magazine subsequently opted not to run. In 1941, Evans' photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three White tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression were published as the groundbreaking book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty. Critic Janet Malcolm notes that a contradiction existed between a kind of anguished dissonance in Agee's prose and the quiet, magisterial beauty of Evans' photographs of sharecroppers.

In 1936, Walker Evans, employed by the National Recovery Administration photographed three impoverished sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama. The photographs became iconic and were praised for effectively capturing the negative effects of the Great Depression in the American South. The photographs are displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum and the National Galleries of Scotland among other places.