Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama

Walker Evans

1936 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

In the summer of 1936 Walker Evans collaborated with writer James Agee on an unpublished article about cotton farmers in the American South, which eventually became the seminal book "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941). For four weeks in July, Evans made photographs of three sharecropper families and their environment—intimate, respectful portraits of the farmers, as well as their homes, furniture, clothing, and rented land. This study of a clean-swept corner is the twelfth plate in the book; it recalls Agee's observations of the significance of "bareness and space" in these homes: "general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another. . . [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have."

Artist

Walker Evans

Date

1936

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1988