Walker Evans, edited by David Campany and published by Fundación MAPFRE and Thames & Hudson to accompany the exhibition Walker Evans: Now and Then, curated by Campany himself and recently closed in Barcelona — is both a major monograph and a fresh reassessment of an artist who was deeply rooted in his time yet remarkably ahead of it.

Evans (1903–1975) remains one of the most enduring figures in the history of photography. His images feel inseparable from the story of the medium itself, and equally inseparable from the story of twentieth-century America. The subjects he chose were quintessentially American — small-town streets, everyday buildings, roadside signs, ordinary people — yet he approached them with the eye of someone who never quite took anything for granted. That combination of intimacy and distance, of belonging and detachment, is what makes his work so hard to forget. He defined an era, yes, but he also kept a certain ironic distance from it, and that tension is perhaps what drew later generations of pop artists and Conceptualists to claim him as a forerunner.

The volume brings together photographs and projects from across his entire career — from the self-portraits of the 1920s to the Polaroid experiments of the 1970s — alongside books and periodicals that shaped and reflected his practice. Texts by David Campany, Sara Ickow, and Stephanie LaCava offer different angles on a body of work that was never just about documentation. Evans wanted his viewers to look more carefully, and to wonder what looking actually means.

Campany, Creative Director of the International Center of Photography in New York, has spent years thinking and writing about Evans, and that depth of engagement shows throughout the book. Walker Evans is not simply a catalogue. It is an invitation to spend time with one of photography’s great questioners — and to come away seeing the world a little differently.