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Condition: All items are offered for sale subject to Swann Galleries' standard terms and conditions of sale, which are published in our catalogues.

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Notes: Acquired from agent (Michael Nichol) in 1993 representing a Midwest collector.
The Photograph and the American Dream 1840-1940, 118.
Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938, 242.

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was created in 1937, during the height of the Depression, to alleviate rural poverty. Originally called the Resettlement Administration (RA), which was part of Roosevelt's New Deal, its mission was to rehabilitate the living and working conditions of poor sharecroppers, farmers and tenants. The FSA is remembered for its influential photography program, which was directed by Roy Stryker. Many notable photographers worked for this agency including Walker Evans, Andreas Feininger, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein and Marion Post Wolcott, among other socially conscious image-makers. The archive of photographic images is composed of over 165,000 prints, 265,000 negative and 1,600 color slides, which were made available to publications and exhibitions at no charge.


Evans worked for the RA and FSA for a brief period, from 1935-1938. In the summer of 1936, during a leave of absence, Evans and writer James Agee were sent by Fortune magazine on assignment to Hale County, Alabama for a story that the magazine would not run. This would subsequently become the foundation for the landmark 1941 publication "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men." During this same window of time, Evans produced the image being offered here. Although Evans's contribution was rather small, he consistently produced images of substantial importance. Working predominately with a large-format, 8x10 inch camera, much of his work in Alabama would be devoted to "architecture and signs, to the shape and texture of the human environment."

The American media environment of the 1930s reflected this new focus on pictures. Illustrated journals and magazines, such as Fortune and LIFE, dominated the print scene. Evans and Stryker often clashed over how a photograph would be read by the public; where Stryker wanted a more propagandistic image, Evans proposed a more pure image. As John Szarkowski wrote in 1973, "[Evans's] poetic uses of bare-faced facts, facts presented with such fastidious reserve that the quality of the picture seemed identical to that of the subject." Overall Evans's images are wrought with a sobering simplicity, lacking of romantic ideals, and a testament to the everyday environment of the common man seen in their embodiment and mimicked on the architectural facade.