For those photography buffs familiar with the groundbreaking pictures he made for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, the notion that a powerful, uncompromising artist like Walker Evans was for decades a staff employee at Time Inc. can sometimes come as something of a shock. There’s a certain cognitive dissonance, after all, in finding that the man who so passionately chronicled — and, in a real sense, ennobled — the dire struggles of the poor in 1930s America was also a salaried editor at, of all places, Fortune magazine.
While at Fortune, Evans worked on countless features in his dual capacity as editor and photographer. Here, on the anniversary of the March 15, 1906, founding of Rolls-Royce, LIFE offers a gallery of Walker Evans photos from one such assignment: pictures he made in August 1958 “at Montreal,” noted Fortune in its December 1, 1958, issue, “at a meet of the Rolls-Royce Owners Club.
(see more photos here)
