- 57
Walker Evans 1903-1975
Description
- Walker Evans
- 'tenant farmer wife' (allie mae burroughs)
Provenance
Acquired by Arnold H. Crane, Chicago, from the photographer, late 1960s
Gift of Arnold H. Crane to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972
Literature
Other prints of this image:
Keller 532
James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston, 1988), unpaginated
John T. Hill, Walker Evans at Work (New York, 1982), p. 127
Walker Evans: First and Last (New York, 1978), p. 73
Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (New York, 1993), pp. 177 and 202
Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, and Mia Fineman, Walker Evans (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 89
Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, eds., Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (London: Tate Modern, 2003), p. 133
Chris Bruce and Andy Grundberg, After Art: Rethinking 150 Years of Photography, Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1994), p. 97
Catalogue Note
Agee and Evans originally started the work that would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an article for Fortune magazine. The writer and photographer stayed with the Burroughs family in their home in Hale County, Alabama, while doing their fieldwork for the project. During this stay, Evans made four portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs against the pine clapboard backdrop of the family’s four-room house (cf. Walker Evans at Work, p. 127). Each portrait captures Allie Mae with a slightly different facial expression. While Evans chose a variant of the image offered here for inclusion in his book, American Photographs, his selection of the present image for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – in which Allie Mae confronts the camera with a steely gaze -- is consonant with the overall intensity of the work. Evans authority Jeff Rosenheim notes that this image was singled out by critics Robert Fitzgerald and Lionel Trilling ‘as the book’s quintessential image’ (Walker Evans, p. 90).