Walker
Evans
Alabama cotton tenant farmer’s wife, 1936
for unpublished article planned for FORTUNE
Horace Bristol
Family of migrant workers, 1938
From "Along the Road: Extracts from a Reporter's Notebook,"
FORTUNE, April 1939.
Their yearly income
has been as low as $173 and there are six adults in the migrant family.
Through the average is higher, perhaps as many as a third of migrant families
have annual incomes of $200 or less.
One of the most talented writers who worked for the business magazine was James Agee, who was hired in 1932 with, as he later said, "eyes rolling upwards." In 1936, he was given an assignment to write a piece on Alabama tenant farmers as the fourth in an in-depth labor series called "Life and Circumstances." Agee specifically requested that he be accompanied by photographer Walker Evans, because he preferred Evans’s realist style. In the end, the magazine did not publish the article--perhaps because it was too late and too long, or because it contained explicitly sexual passages. But Agee’s greatly expanded text was published in 1941, with Evans’s photographs, as the now-classic book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
After it became clear that the Depression would not be short-lived, Fortune had to adjust its approach to address the gnawing questions of its cause, effect, and remedy. Articles on topics similar to the Agee-Evans assignment included "Biggest Cotton Plantation," with photographs by Eisenstaedt (1937), and "Along the Road," with photographs by Bristol (1939).
Walker Evans had first published in Fortune in September 1934, when he illustrated a rather quirky article on the U.S. Communist party. In 1935 and 1937, Evans worked for the Farm Security Administration documenting social conditions mostly in the South. Much of this FSA work was published in Evans’s 1938 book American Photographs, which brought him great acclaim. Evans’s Fortune work from the thirties and early forties--"The Communist Party" (1934) and "In Bridgeport’s War Factories" (1941), for example--is typical of photojournalism of the time: a people-centered approach that contrasts with the machine-oriented, industrial imagery of Bourke-White, Rittase, and others.
