Walker Evans

mounted, signed in pencil on the mount, annotations in pencil on the reverse, framed, 1936, printing date unknown

The Collection of Van Deren Coke

Sotheby's New York, 11 May 1983, Sale 5043, Lot 392

Private Collection, New York

Sotheby's New York, 15 October 1992, Sale 6344, Lot 178

Private Collection, North America

Other prints of this image:

Walker Evans, American Photographs (Museum of Modern Art, 1988), Part One, pl. 6, variant cropping

Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection (The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), 497

Tod Papageorge, Walker Evans and Robert Frank: An Essay on Influence (New Haven, 1981), p. 42, variant

Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938 (New York, 1973), pl. 170, variant cropping

Gilles Mora and John Hill, Walker Evans: The Hunrgy Eye (New York, 1993), p. 144, variant cropping

Jeff L. Rosenheim, Maria Morris Hambourg, Douglas Eklund, and Mia Fineman, Walker Evans (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 82, variant cropping

John Hill and Alan Trachtenberg, Walker Evans: Lyric Documentary, Selections from Evans' work for the U. S. Resettlement Administration and the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1937 (Washington, D. C., 2006), p. 124, variant cropping

The print is on semi-glossy paper and is in essentially excellent condition. The print has a rich tonality, and delivers a great deal of detail. When it is examined very closely in raking light, the following are visible: a number of tiny matte deposits, likely original retouching; a ½-inch sharp, linear crease in the lower right corner; and a ¾- by 1¾-inch raised area, likely due to a label on the reverse of the print, in the upper left corner. There is very minor wear to the print's lower left corner edges. In the lower left quadrant near the barber's chair, there is a pen-point-sized deposit of indeterminate nature. None of these issues detract from the overwhelmingly fine appearance of this print. The print is neatly dry-mounted to thick white board with a tan core. There are a few stray graphite-colored marks near the left mount edge and on the reverse. On the reverse of the mount are the following annotations in an unidentified hand in pencil: 'Walker Evans;' 'Negro Barber Shop;' 'Atlanta;' and '1936, print date unknown.' As is frequently the case with photographs by Walker Evans, the printing date of this example is impossible to determine definitively. The richness of the print, and the older type of board used for the mount, clearly differentiate it from the prints Evans produced in the 1970s, which were much cooler in tone and were mounted (when they were mounted) on solid-white museum board. In order to get a fuller understanding of when this photograph may have been made, the current owner submitted it to conservator Paul Messier for testing. A copy of Messier's report on the photograph is available upon request. Messier examined the print under ultraviolet light to test for optical brighteners in the paper. The print failed to fluoresce under UV light, indicating a lack of optical brighteners. Messier notes that the mount did fluoresce slightly, however, under this examination. Messier also tested a minute sample of the paper's fiber, and his analysis of this sample indicates a broad range of possible manufacturing dates. The comparatively rare presence of birch-wood fiber in the Evans print, however, may provide a clue to the paper's date range when a larger sampling of photographic papers is compiled.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The print offered here comes originally from the influential curator, historian, photographer, collector, and author Van Deren Coke (1921–2004).  That Coke knew Walker Evans is documented, and it is possible, although unconfirmed, that he acquired the print directly from Evans himself.  In 1938, while still a teenager, Van Deren Coke bought his first photographs—from none other than Edward Weston, whose work he admired and whom he visited at Wildcat Hill.   As Coke recounted many years later, in introductions to exhibition catalogues of his collection, this visit marked a turning point in his life, not only as a photographer, but also as a collector.  Coke then went on to acquire works from both the 19^th and 20^th centuries, at a time when few were interested in the medium as a fine art.  Various exhibition catalogues of works from his collection list a number of Evans photographs, along with images by Ansel Adams, Harry Callahan, Dorothea Lange, Charles Sheeler, Minor White, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, and Paul Strand, several of whom Coke met and knew personally.  Coke donated a number of photographs by these and other photographers to the University of New Mexico Art Museum in Albuquerque, where he was the founding director; and to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where he was the director of the department of photography from 1979 to 1987.

This print of the Negro Barbershop Interior is believed to have been made from negative 8100A, now in the Library of Congress (see Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938, pl. 170).  This full negative shows a very slightly wider crop of the image than that reproduced in much of the Evans literature.  In raking light, in the upper left quadrant of the print offered here, one can see the outline of a small label—origin unknown—on the reverse of the photograph that was present before the photograph was mounted.  As recounted by Jerry Thompson in his The Last Years of Walker Evans (New York, 1997, pp. 44-54), as photographs began to enter the realm of the fine art market in the early 1970s, Evans stopped dry-mounting his prints and began to hinge them to board. 

Prints of the Negro Barbershop Interior, as is true of several of Evans's most iconic images, are scarce.  Only a handful of prints of any vintage have appeared at auction in the past two decades: at the time of this writing, there have been located in the auction records two prints from The Museum of Modern Art, one sold in these rooms twice, and both believed to be early; a later print, with the Lunn Gallery stamp on the reverse; a print of indeterminate age from a private collection; and the print offered here, also sold in these rooms twice previously.