Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975
Penny Picture Display, Savannah
INV-8858
Walker Evans
American, 1903–19751936, printed c. 1962
Penny Picture Display, Savannah
Walker Evans American, 1903–1975 →gelatin silver (developing-out-paper) prphotographic process
Date
1936, printed c. 1962
Medium
Gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Image/paper/first mount: 21.7 × 17.7 cm (8 9/16 × 7 in.); Second mount: 45.7 × 35.3 cm (18 × 13 15/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. James Ward Thorne
Walker Evans was remarkably adept at straddling the cultural divide between documentary photography and the museum. One of several photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the Depression, Evans made some of his most famous images in the summer of 1936: pictures of impoverished families in Hale County, Alabama, later published in his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Just two years later, he was honored with a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which had only recently embraced photography as an art form. This image of the many portraits in a photographer’s studio—an homage to the workaday photographer and the faces of ordinary Americans—became, in the context of a museum exhibition, a statement about the art and meaning of photography.
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