After Walker Evans: 2

Sherrie Levine

1981 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

In 1981, Levine photographed reproductions of Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans, such as this famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of an Alabama sharecropper. The series, entitled After Walker Evans, became a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism. Far from a high-concept cheap shot, Levine's works from this series tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning, the inability to recapture the past, and our own lost illusions.

Artist

Sherrie Levine

Date

1981

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of the artist, 1995