Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories

In 1973, Michael Lesy was a young scholar whose first book had just been published. In the soon-legendary Wisconsin Death Trip he combined 1890s photographs and newspaper clippings to evoke a devastatingly tragic epoch, the real-world antithesis of the fanciful "Gay Nineties." It startled readers then and remains a touchstone of modern photographic interpretation.

That year Lesy met and became close friends with the great photographer Walker Evans, who in the 1930s had collaborated with writ...