PHOTOGRAPHS
Evans, Walker
U.S. (1903 - 1975)
Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife [Allie Mae Burroughs]
1936
Gelatin silver print
9 1/4 x 7 3/8 in. (23.5 x 18.7 cm) image and sheet size
Joseph and Elaine Monsen Photography Collection, gift of Joseph and Elaine Monsen and The Boeing Company
FA 97.57

Walker Evans is generally acknowledged as America's finest documentary photographer and the artist who more than any other created the image Americans have of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The special character of his work -- its style and tone -- has influenced photographers, filmmakers, graphic artists, and many others. His style has been described as straight, direct, unhurried, unobtrusive, transparent; his tone as calm, timeless, strong, sad, silent. With James Agee, he coauthored the now classic document of the Depression in the South, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, one of the first photo essays to emphasize both the beauty of his subjects, and the terrible social conditions in which that beauty grew. For Evans, people and their surroundings were the only interesting subject matter; he once said that nature bored him as an art form. In this portrait it is the woman herself that counts the most for him: her face, her dress, her expression. He took great care not to change his subjects physically or spiritually, and this became his central photographic achievement. When he framed the life of the poor in a photograph, sensitive onlookers can feel the intensity of his respect. -- Label copy for After Art: Rethinking 150 Years of Photography, December 4, 1994 to March 26, 1995.