WALKER EVANS
WALKER EVANS. By James R. Mellow. Basic. 654 pp. $40
WALKER EVANS. By James R. Mellow. Basic. 654 pp. $40
By 1956, when this biography ends, the photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) had done his most important work. In his last years, he spent too little time looking into a viewfinder and too much time looking into a bottle. Still, these final two decades of his life, for which the publisher appends a chronology, might have given a perspective to Evans's achievements that this unfinished book (the author died before completing it) never attains.