WALKER EVANS (1903–1975)

In his essay in Walker Evans: American Photographs, the catalogue which accompanied the landmark exhibition of Evans' work in 1938 at The Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Kirstein observed, 'There has been no need for Evans to dramatize his material with photographic tricks, because the material is already, in itself, intensely dramatic...The faces, even those tired, vicious or content, are past reflecting accidental emotions. They are isolated and essentialized. The power of Evans' work lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets' (Kirstein, Walker Evans: American Photographs, p. 197).

The portrait offered here, Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama, appeared on a page opposite the portrait Floyd Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama (Lot 119) in Evans' and James Agee's collaborative work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of 1941. The images throughout the book, and in particular these two portraits, have become, for many, synonymous with the Great Depression and the rural south of 1930s America. Allie Mae Burroughs, Hale County, Alabama has transcended this period, much like Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (Lot 22), made the same year, and has become an icon of a time and place in American history.