Walker Evans on Paul Strand’s Blind (1916)

In a 1971 interview with Leslie Katz, Walker Evans was reluctant to talk about photographers and photographs that influenced him. Paul Strand’s 1916 image of the blind peddler was the one photograph he cited:

I remember coming across Paul Strand's Blind Woman when I was very young, and that really bowled me over. I'd already been in that and wanted to do that. It's a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library file of "Camera Work," and I remember going out of there over stimulated: "That's the stuff, that's the thing to do." It charged me up.

Leslie Katz. “An Interview with Walker Evans.” (1971) pp. 366-7. In Goldberg, Vicki (Ed.) Photography in Print, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981.