Stieglitz thought about it, but beneath all the bombast he was too much of a romantic. Hine thought about it, as did Riis, but photography for them was chiefly a means to an end for a Socialist and a muckraker. Lange's interests were more about Humanity with a capital 'H', and even though you can practically hear strains of 'America the Beautiful' when you look at one of his landscapes, Ansel Adams, well, he just couldn't seem to get past the Luminists.
When all was said and done, at least up through the Second World War, no one quite hit the nail of the American Experience on it's head as squarely as did Walker Evans. That, coupled with the fact that much of his best work is, as property of the Library of Congress, in the public domain, makes Evans a much-mined resource resource for the covers of books; fact or fiction. KB

Covering Photography is a web-based archive and resource for the study of the relationship between the history of photography and book cover design. Read more about the project.