portraiture/ Walker Evans

PORTRAITURE: 

Portraits have been around since the beginning of time to describe physical features. But more importantly power and status. Portraiture as a genre can be seen as early as Ancient Egyptian wall paintings of gods and pharaohs. Ancient Greeks also had a fascination with portraiture.  Romans followed a similar tradition borrowing motifs from Ancient Egypt and Greece and developing a flair for portrait busts of key power personalities. Ancient Greek and Romans were also the ones who started the tradition of depicting figure-heads on coins. During the Middles ages portraiture declined and was strictly confined to donor portraits.
Portraiture has come along way since the camera was first introduced because the only way of getting a portrait done was by having yourself painted by a professional artist. you would only get painted if you were famous, rich, or important of some sort. 

WALKER EVENS:

walker Evans was an american photographer best known for his work on Farm Security Administration (FSA) who mainly worked on 'The Great Depression'. Much of his work was taken with a 8x10-inch camera with a large format, for the FSA. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are "literate, authoritative, and out of this world''. 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 'George Eastman'. 

Born in St. Louis, Missouri Walker Evans came from an affluent family. His father was an advertising director. He spent his youth in Chicago and New York City. He graduated from Phillips Academy, in Andover, Massachusetts, 1922. He studied French literature for a year at Williams College, spending much of his time in the school's library, before dropping out. After spending a year in Paris in 1926, he returned to the United States to join the edgy literary and art crowd in New York City. John Cheever, Hart Crane, andLincoln Kirstein were among his friends. He was a clerk for a stockbroker firm in Wall street from 1927 to 1929.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walker_Evans