American Classics: Selected Photographs of Alabama by Walker Evans
This exhibition features a selection of images made in 1936, when the editors of Fortune magazine sent writer, James Agee and photographer, Walker Evans on assignment to document the southern sharecropping economic system. The results of their project became much more personal, bringing to light the crushing poverty that defined the greater part of the lives of the three sharecropper families they met there: the Burroughs, the Fields and the Tingles. Evans’ approach to the visual material he found in Perry and Hale Counties in Alabama was more objective and he was better able to distance himself from his subjects than Agee was able to do in his writing, but it was Evans’ distinctive photographic abilities and his unique perception of the world that enabled him to transform what he found into a formal beauty defined by radiant light, which made the most mundane settings appear to be extraordinary. The visual clarity of these classically composed images of the family members, their homes and their possessions forced the viewer to reconsider these people for their inner strength, perseverance and humanity. Both Agee and Evans seemed to have challenged the preconceived notions of the editors at Fortune and their work for this assignment was rejected, giving Agee the excuse and opportunity to expand the text and seek out a publisher. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941, was presented as two separate portfolios, with thirty-one of Evans’ images, followed by Agee’s subjective descriptions of the lives and possessions of these farmers interwoven with his complex meditations on the nature of art and culture. American Classics: Selected Photographs of Alabama by Walker Evans presents many of the now-iconic images that appeared in the initial printing of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, along with additional photographs included in subsequent editions.
American Classics also represents an exciting, recent addition to the Museum’s permanent collection, featuring 45 modern digital prints of Evans’ photographs produced by the United States Library of Congress. In the spring of 2008, working from Evans’ original negatives or from photographic prints in their archives, the Department of Prints and Photography of the Library of Congress painstakingly produced these archival digital prints specifically for the Museum. To augment the JCSM versions and provide comparison with images produced using modern technologies, the exhibition includes several vintage gelatin-silver prints on loan from the University of New Mexico Art Museum and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta.
This exhibition features a selection of images made in 1936, when the editors of Fortune magazine sent writer, James Agee and photographer, Walker Evans on assignment to document the southern sharecropping economic system. The results of their project became much more personal, bringing to light the crushing poverty that defined the greater part of the lives of the three sharecropper families they met there: the Burroughs, the Fields and the Tingles. Evans’ approach to the visual material he found in Perry and Hale Counties in Alabama was more objective and he was better able to distance himself from his subjects than Agee was able to do in his writing, but it was Evans’ distinctive photographic abilities and his unique perception of the world that enabled him to transform what he found into a formal beauty defined by radiant light, which made the most mundane settings appear to be extraordinary. The visual clarity of these classically composed images of the family members, their homes and their possessions forced the viewer to reconsider these people for their inner strength, perseverance and humanity. Both Agee and Evans seemed to have challenged the preconceived notions of the editors at Fortune and their work for this assignment was rejected, giving Agee the excuse and opportunity to expand the text and seek out a publisher. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, first published in 1941, was presented as two separate portfolios, with thirty-one of Evans’ images, followed by Agee’s subjective descriptions of the lives and possessions of these farmers interwoven with his complex meditations on the nature of art and culture. American Classics: Selected Photographs of Alabama by Walker Evans presents many of the now-iconic images that appeared in the initial printing of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, along with additional photographs included in subsequent editions. 