June 17, 2009

Walker Evans for Fortune




Lots of magazines have their haydays: Playboy in the 50s, Esquire in the 60s, Rolling Stone in the 70s....some even have a couple of good stretches. One magazine that I don't normally think too much about in those terms (I'm not quite their target demographic) is Fortune. But after a recent visit to the Prelinger Library where I was able to flip through some back issues of the magazine, I was delighted to discover that it too had a period of particular relevance and beauty around the middle of the last century. Each issue was filled with gorgeous illustrations, charts, and most surprisingly to me—photographs. The man behind the lens in most of best examples I came across was Walker Evans. Of course I'd seen his work countless other places, but I had no idea he photographed AND wrote for Fortune.

So head on over to the Prelinger Library for a leisurely perusal of vintage Fortunes (and the rest of their amazing treasure trove of stuff), or click on the images above to go directly to online versions of the stories courtesy of a wonderfully curated site, The Visual Telling of Stories, which not only has a great collection of Evans work, but tons and tons of other visual gems as well.

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