Walker Evans began taking snapshots during a trip to Paris in 1926. By 1928, he had taken up photography in a serious way. Just five years later, he had a show at the Museum of Modern Art – MoMA's first photography exhibition.

On Saturday, what is being billed as the most comprehensive exhibition of the celebrated U.S. photographer's work ever mounted in Canada opens at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Walker Evans: Depth of Field is curated by John T. Hill, a colleague and friend of Evans and executor of his estate (Evans died in 1975). The rich and thrilling retrospective includes more than 200 photographs showcasing the pioneering narrative style Evans liked to call lyric documentary – as well as some of the signs he loved to steal.

Evans was born in 1903 in St. Louis, Mo., and aspired to become a writer. He took that dream to Paris in 1926, where, according to Hill, he once hid from James Joyce at Shakespeare and Company book shop when owner Sylvia Beach tried to introduce them.

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"Walker runs around and hides behind the bookcase because he was so intimidated by the idea of meeting James Joyce," Hill says. "He was like God; and he wasn't ready to meet God." In Paris, Evans found a new way to tell stories, snapping photos with his pocket camera.

Back in New York, "he really got the bug," says Hill, who worked with Evans at Yale. By late 1928, he was obsessed. "Couldn't keep him in, if the light was good."

The photos from this time announce a remarkable eye for composition, contrast and light – and an astute awareness that what the camera sees is different from what the eye sees. This is New York as zoomed in on by Evans – laundry blowing on the line like sails, the Chrysler Building under construction, a window of light in between Wall Street's shadowy towers.

This is also evident in his Brooklyn Bridge photographs, several of which were published in Hound & Horn, Lincoln Kirstein's literary magazine. Kirstein, co-founder of the New York City Ballet, was a terrific friend and patron of Evans.

Fearing Victorian architecture was disappearing, Kirstein commissioned Evans to document examples in New England and upstate New York. One magnificent shot shows a river of cars lined up on two sides of a flooded street in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., bare trees rising from concrete sidewalks.

"It has that wonderful romantic rainy-day-in-Paris, fog-in-London [feel]," Hill says. "But it's better than all that."

Thrilled with the results, Kirstein proposed a show of these works to MoMA. Astonishingly, just a week later, Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses opened.

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"That was back when if you had the money and the connections you could make things happen," Hill says.

In 1938, MoMA mounted a much larger exhibition – more than 100 works – Walker Evans: American Photographs, and published a catalogue of the same name. A press release announced that it was MoMa's "first one-man photography exhibition." In fact it was the second, after Evans's 1933 show.

But it was the 1935 commission by what became the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) that led to the body of work that would come to define Evans. Looking to document the recovery initiated by the New Deal – and thus build support for then-U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt's policies – the FSA sent Evans and several other photographers across the country to capture the areas and people hit hard by the Great Depression. Evans's images were dispassionate yet evocative – even if he produced fewer photographs than anyone else on the team.

"Evans kind of became famous for not doing what he was told to do," says Vancouver Art Gallery curator Grant Arnold, who assisted on the show. "He would do enough of what he was told to do to keep his job."

Evans also travelled New York's subways for a project he completed in 1941. His camera hidden in his coat, he snapped photos without looking through the lens. Brilliant and innovative, his subway portraits are meant to be seen grouped together, as they are in this exhibition.

Evans loved to photograph signs and posters, appropriating them in his work. A building is plastered with signs advertising photos, movers load a sign saying "Damaged" onto a truck and a favourite of Hill's, Torn Movie Poster.

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"He said 'this is where I invented pop art,' " Hill says. "And if you look at the Lichstensteins, they don't get any better than this."

Evans also loved to collect signs – not necessarily legally. He would go out, or send someone out, to remove them from where they were hung. There are several signs in this show – advertising soft drinks, tea, pointing toward an exit.

Hill tells a great story from Evans's time at Dartmouth College, where he had dinner regularly with the sculptor Varujan (Bugsy) Boghosian.

"Bugsy said every night they would go by this sign and Walker would take out his wrench and he would turn all four screws, just a little bit," Hill says, pointing to the Trott's barber shop sign. "And he said one night he turned all four screws and it fell on the ground and he grabbed it and we ran like hell."

Nearly everything in this exhibition was done on assignment. "That is an amazing bit of genius," Hill says. "He was able to take a mundane assignment, take the money and turn it around and make something personal out of it. Almost everybody else on the team were being good soldiers and they were doing what they were told. And Evans was out there unsupervised, goofing off, doing what he wanted."

Walker Evans: Depth of Field is at the Vancouver Art Gallery Oct. 29 to Jan. 22.