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Washroom and Dining Area of Floyd Burrouths' Home, Hale County Alabama, Walker Evans
Date Issued: 2002-06-13
Postage Value: 37 cents

Commemorative issue
Masters of American Photography
Washroom and Dining Area of Floyd Burrouths' Home, Hale County Alabama, Walker Evans

Walker Evans had a reputation, if not a steady income, as a photographer when Roy Stryker hired him at the Resettlement Administration in October 1935. Evans had taken up photography in 1928, at the age of twenty-five. He lived, in his own words, "very shabbily" in New York City, where he began to experiment with the medium by photographing city street life and vernacular architecture and by making portraits of his artist and intellectual friend. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, his paid projects included illustrating a book that exposed the evils of Cuba's Machado regime and photographing African sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art.

Evans came to the Resettlement Administration after doing some part-time work at the Department of the Interior, and his ideas about the systematic documentation of American culture influenced Stryker during the early period of the Historical Section. In notes written in 1934 and 1935 concerning the creation of photographs by the federal government, Evans called for images that would be a "pure record not propaganda," and he composed a list of subjects that resembled Stryker's later shooting scripts.  During the eighteen months or so that he worked at the agency, he photographed in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, but his best-known work during the period was a series of photographs of Alabama sharecroppers produced for Fortune magazine during a leave of absence. The periodical published neither the photographs nor the text that James Agee wrote to counterpoint them, but the work finally appeared in the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The many influential photographs Evans made during this period were described by the critic John Szarkowski in 1973 as "poetic uses of bare-faced facts, facts presented with such fastidious reserve that the quality of the picture seemed identical to that of the subject."

Stryker admired Evans's photographs, but the two men did not always get along well. In part this reflected differences in personality, but it also reflected the conflict between Evans's ideal of creating a pure record and Stryker's concern with producing photographs useful to the agency and promoting political or social change. The two parted company during 1937 and Evans returned to New York, where he worked on his exhibit and book American Photographs, continued to prepare his contribution to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and began to make a series of photographs in the city's subways.

In spite of his high level of creative activity, Evans seems to have been in need of money. Letters he and Stryker exchanged during April, May, and June 1938 refer to Evans's failure to obtain a Guggenheim Fellowship and allude to a possible short-term assignment for the Farm Security Administration. These photographs taken in New York City probably represent the outcome of the matter, although nothing in the agency's files explains the selection of the subject, if Evans was paid, or whether he and Stryker were satisfied with the pictures.
 

Topic: Art (698)  

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