WALKER EVANS (1903–1975)

The present lot was originally acquired by a private collector, when they were a student at Harvard. The student visited Evans’s home and subsequently purchased this print from Evans directly.

In his essay in American Photographs, the catalogue which accompanied Evans' 1936 landmark exhibition 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.’ (op. cit., p. 197).