Walker Evans Celebration

We have invited UK photographer, Stephen Leslie, to do the lecture about Walker Evans on October 6 and a Street Photography workshop on October 5. The Sunday celebration and lecture is free and open to the public thanks to a genourus grant by the Springield Cultural Commission. Light refreshments will be provided. Although the event is free we would like people to get tickets in advance to help in our planning.

Stephen Leslie is a photographer, writer and film maker from London. He has over 25 years experience both in the UK and on extensive travels abroad. His work has feature in numerous magazine and websites, including The Guardian, The Observer, Lensculture, Cup, Huck, Eyeshot, Seen, Framelines, Eric Kim, The photoblographer, Time Out, C41, ALU, Streetphotography.com, Wonders of Photography, On Spot Gallery, and 121 Clicks. The list goes on...

Stephen's ongoing project on the festival of PURIM was included as part of the Hoxton Mini Press anthology in 2017. In 2018 a first solo book, , was published by Unbound and Penguin. Lensculture described the book as, "funny, deep, at times disturbing, at other times profoundly hopeful. But every image gets remade in ways that hod a bit of genius." Sparks is a unique book that combines 80 images, each one of which is accompanied by a short story written in response to the image. Sparks is now completely sold out, a sequel Mostly False Reports was published at the end of 2023.

Stephen was also include in the recently published Thames and Hudson, 2023 anthology, , edited by Matt Stuart and Stephen McLaren described as, "A world tour of the very best street photography today".

A couple of yers ago, David Solomons' imprint published three zines, Where Did You Get That Hat? The Schleppers and People Holding Dogs. Recently Stephen's published four more on his own, Hereabouts, That London, Dogs in Cars, Waiting or Being Held, and Elbows.

You can see more of his work at www.stephenlislie.com.uk or on Instagram, @step_hen_les_lie.

Walker Evans

Walker Evans is one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. His elegant, crystal-clear photographs and articulate publications have inspired several generations of artists, from Helen Levitt and Robert Frank to Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher. The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular—the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés (1971.646.35), advertisements (1987.1100.59), simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Valley Photo Center, 1500 Main Street, Springfield, United States