Curator: Alexander Moore, Creative Producer, Dulwich Picture Gallery
Artists: Berenice Abbott, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Ilse Bing, Margaret Bourke‑White, Ted Croner, Imogen Cunningham, Bruce Davidson, Roy DeCarava, William Eggleston, Morris Engel, Walker Evans, Louis Faurer, Lee Friedlander, John Gutmann, Lewis Hine, Peter Hujar, André Kertész, William Klein, Dorothea Lange, Saul Leiter, Arthur Leipzig, Rebecca Lepkoff, Helen Levitt, Mary Ellen Mark, Elaine Mayes, Lisette Model, Nicholas Nixon, Ruth Orkin, Ed Ruscha, Aaron Siskind, Herbert Snitzer, Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Weegee, Edward Weston and Garry Winogrand
Some well-known favourites sprinkled with photographs unknown to me:
Berenice Abbott’s Exchange Place, New York (1933) Margaret Bourke‑White’s Augusta, Georgia (1936) Morris Engel’s Harlem Merchant, New York (1937) Louis Faurer’s Looking at the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center (1949) Saul Leiter’s Orange Umbrella (c. 1950) William Klein’s Happy Days Bar, 3rd Avenue, New York (1954) Peter Hujar’s Richie (1985)
I thought I knew most of Hujar’s photographs but not this one!
My favourite of the photographs I haven’t seen before is Roy DeCarava’s Hallway (1953), a moody evocation of tenement life in an American city.
So many images so little time!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“The exhibition as a whole retells the American narrative of the city – almost all of the photographers here are first- or second-generation European immigrants. It also shows how photography became a way for artists to deal with the overwhelming nature of the city, to try to take hold of it, to make it their own – or try, like Garry Winogrand, to disappear into it completely, to come closer to “not existing” as the photographer described his process, a quote emphasised on the exhibition wall. Portrait of a City is about the multiplicity of quiet-but-dazzling instants that happen every day – like Peter Hujar’s Richie, standing to reflect for a second in the rain on a street in New York at night, raindrops glimmering on a car windscreen.”
Step into a century of American city life through photographs that capture the people who built, inhabited, and transformed urban spaces into living, breathing communities.
The exhibition explores one hundred years of American urban life through the people who lived, worked, and moved through its streets. Featuring works by 34 influential photographers from 1907 to 2012, the exhibition traces how photography evolved alongside the modern city, capturing individuals and communities shaped by and shaping their environments.
Photography and the American City
Set in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco, the photographs reveal cities as dynamic stages for social change. From mass immigration and industrial growth to moments of counterculture and protest, photographers used urban spaces to examine identity, labour, and belonging. Adapting the traditions of portraiture, they recorded faces and lives that reflect the inner story of a nation in flux.
Artists and Highlights
Highlights include works by Alfred Stieglitz, Helen Levitt, Dorothea Lange, Lewis Hine, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Bruce Davidson. Seen together, these portraits and cityscapes form a collective narrative that is both intimate and expansive, capturing the human experience at the heart of America’s evolving cities.
Partners and Collections
The exhibition is presented in special partnership with The Savings Bank Foundation DNB, drawing from its outstanding collection of twentieth-century American photography, with thanks to our partner, Lillehammer Art Museum.
Text from the Dulwich Picture Gallery website
Lewis Hine (American, 1874-1940) Riding the Ball High up on Empire State c. 1930 Courtesy of The Savings Bank Foundation DNB Collection, on deposit at Lillehammer Art Museum
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York 1931 Gelatin silver print
Edward Steichen (American, 1879-1973) The Maypole (Empire State Building) 1932 Gelatin silver print
Berenice Abbott (American, 1898-1991) Exchange Place, New York 1933 Gelatin silver print
Dorothea Lange (American, 1895-1965) White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, California 1933 Gelatin silver print
Dulwich Picture Gallery announces Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography
In summer 2026, Dulwich Picture Gallery will present a major new exhibition Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography, bringing together more than 100 landmark works by some of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. The exhibition will chart the dramatic evolution of American city life from the early 1900s to the close of the 20th century. Featuring images from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, the exhibition draws exclusively from the DNB Saving Bank Foundation’s collection in Norway.
Showcasing 38 leading photographers of the modern era, Portrait of a City traces how photography has shaped our collective understanding of the American city.
It demonstrates how rapid urban expansion catalysed the medium’s rise as a tool to document changing conditions, presenting a compelling visual account of a nation in motion.
The exhibition opens in the early 1900s, a moment when American cities expanded rapidly through mass immigration, industrial growth and new forms of labour, drawing photographers to sites of social and economic shift. Evolving skylines became symbols of change, captured in works such as Lewis Hine’s Riding the Ball High up on Empire State, 1930. At the same time, photographers like Alfred Stieglitz were redefining the medium’s artistic potential; his seminal image The Steerage, 1907, reveals the realities of labour and class with striking immediacy.
After the Wall Street Crash in 1929, photography took on an urgent social role, recording mass unemployment, poverty and migration. Iconic works, including Dorothea Lange’s White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, 1933 and Margaret Bourke‑White’s Augusta, Georgia, 1936 trace the profound impact of the Great Depression, bringing into sharp focus the harsh realities of the following years for people across the United States.
Here, the exhibition changes gear, tracing the rise of photographic modernism through artists such as Walker Evans, whose work helped secure photography’s place within the modern art world. Alongside this, the influence of the New York Photo League is represented through photographers including Weegee, Morris Engel, Ruth Orkin, Aaron Siskind, Rebecca Lepkoff and Lisette Model, whose socially engaged images document the rhythms and pressures of everyday urban life. Also presented are intimate portrayals of marginalised communities in New York, including Helen Levitt and Saul Leiter’s studies of street life and Roy DeCarava’s tender images of Black life in Harlem.
The exhibition then turns to artists documenting the dramatic physical changes reshaping American cities in the mid‑20th century. Works by Berenice Abbott record the evolution of New York’s skyline, setting new architectural forms against the city’s historic fabric, while Arthur Leipzig’s Divers, East River, 1948 captures how peripheral urban spaces became sites of leisure and community.
Moving into the 1960s and 1970s, the exhibition explores how photographers responded to a nation undergoing cultural and political transformation. Artists such as Ed Ruscha and Robert Adams examined the structures and systems of the built environment, while Garry Winogrand, Diane Arbus and Lee Friedlander brought new immediacy to street photography. This section also presents powerful depictions of life on the margins, including Mary Ellen Mark’s The Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, 1987, which confronts the realities of homelessness, and Peter Hujar’s Richie, 1985, offering an intimate insight into communities affected by the AIDS crisis.
Portrait of a City concludes with a presentation of Bruce Davidson’s renowned Subway series, 1980-85, whose vivid, unflinching photographs capture the diversity, individuality and raw immediacy of New York life, an enduring hallmark of the photographer’s career.
Alexander Moore, Creative Producer, Dulwich Picture Gallery and Curator of the exhibition, said: “American photography offers one of the most vivid and influential records of the modern city, and by bringing this remarkable collection to London, we invite audiences to reflect on how the rhythms, challenges and possibilities of urban life continue to echo through our own – a century of human stories told with extraordinary immediacy and invention.”
Anders Bjørnsen, Manager, Art & Culture, DNB Savings Bank Foundation, said: “These photographs capture the profound social and cultural changes that have shaped the modern American city. We are pleased to share this important collection with new audiences through our collaboration with Dulwich Picture Gallery, and to highlight photography’s unique ability to tell human stories across time and place.”
Jennifer Scott, Director, Dulwich Picture Gallery, said: “The spirit, aspiration, and reality of the 20th Century are captured in these photographs. Meticulously collected over the past ten years by the DNB Savings Bank Foundation, the exhibition is testament to this outstanding Norwegian art collection and creates exciting visual links to the landscape paintings in our Collection.”
Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography is curated by Alexander Moore, Creative Producer, Dulwich Picture Gallery (Curator of Unearthed: Photography’s Roots, 2021). The exhibition will be accompanied by a full-colour publication written and edited by Alexander Moore and Nils Ohlsen, Director, Lillehammer Art Museum, published by Dulwich Picture Gallery, June 2026.
Press release from the Dulwich Picture Gallery
Arthur Leipzig (American, 1918-2014) Divers, East River 1948 Gelatin silver print Arthur Leipzig/Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Louis Faurer (American, 1916-2001) Looking at the RCA Building at Rockefeller Center 1949 Gelatin silver print Louis Faurer/Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
Roy DeCarava (American, 1919-2009) Hallway 1953 Gelatin silver print
Garry Winogrand (American, 1928-1984) John F. Kennedy, Democratic National Convention, Los Angeles 1960 From the portfolio Big Shots Gelatin silver print
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled 1980-85 From the Subway series Dye-transfer/chromogenic print
“I wanted to transform the subway from its dark, degrading, and impersonal reality into images that open up our experience again to the color, sensuality, and vitality of the individual souls that ride it each day.”
“It’s a great social equalizer … From the moving train above ground, we see glimpses of the city, and as the train moves into the tunnels, sterile fluorescent light reaches into the stony gloom and we, trapped inside, all hang on together”
“I feel that there was a passion and a purpose to photographing in the subway. We were all in the same boat and I was just expressing the everyday occurrences in the subway at that point in 1980. It’s a different subway, although you still have to watch your back.”
~ Bruce Davidson
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled 1980-85 From the Subway series Dye-transfer/chromogenic print
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled 1980-85 From the Subway series Dye-transfer/chromogenic print
Bruce Davidson (American, b. 1933) Untitled 1980-85 From the Subway series Dye-transfer/chromogenic print
“Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty.” Dr Marcus Bunyan
In the medium of photography the work of the American photographer Walker Evans (1903-1975) is rightly exalted, subject to the highest praise. “His work directly inspired photographers like Robert Frank, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.” Some of the most important photographers of the 20th century.
In the near 18 year history of Art Blart his importance can be gauged by the number of exhibition postings he has accumulated over the journey, this being the 8th posting on the artist, joining a select few at the top of the tree: Julia Margaret Cameron, August Sander, Robert Frank, William Eggleston, Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol.
I have written extensively on Evans’s work in previous postings links to which can be found below. Suffice to say that, through awareness, his personal journey of conscious choice and deliberate self-creation has led to his photographs entering the American vernacular – through a direct pointing to a photographic reality that reflects the time in which they were taken. Which transcend the time in which they were taken.
Evans took photographs worth taking – unadorned, clearly seen, focused, descriptive photographs (of ordinary things) of the utmost beauty and honesty. He was a passionate photographer. You can feel that passion in his images. Today with a world full of AI images, fragmentation, and conceptual hoo-hah, it might do us all well to ponder the stare of this great artist so that we, in our own way, can die knowing something.
To transform your own destiny into awareness!
“When I first looked at Walker Evans’ photographs, I thought of something Malraux wrote: ‘To transform destiny into awareness.’ One is embarrassed to want so much for oneself. But, how else are you going to justify your failure and your effort?” ~ Robert Frank
Many thankx to Fundación Mapfre for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
“I was a passionate photographer and, for a time, I carried a certain feeling of guilt. I thought photography was replacing something else: writing. I wanted to write. But I felt deeply committed to everything that could come out of a camera, and I became a compulsive photographer. I was responding to a genuine impulse.”
“Stare. It is the way to educate the eye, and something more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something. You are not here long.”
Walker Evans
“Walker Evans is serious and smart and purposeful. He is trying to show you very clearly what he is seeing. It is very unadorned, as if nobody had taken the photograph. He conveys what is in front of him as clearly as possible.”
Interview with Chris Killip about his exhibition Work at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia, October 2013 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021
”Good clothes and good conversation, wit and erudition, originality and inventiveness, the charms of smart and pretty women – Walker took pleasure in being alive… He photographed objects as if they were people and people as if they were souls. All the while, he never forgot Blind Joe Death. The annihilations of the First War, the extinctions of the epidemic that followed it, the pyres and the pits – these he never forgot. The still silence of his images was, to the very last, transcendental, and always he remembered the skull beneath the skin.”
Michael Levy. Walker Evans: Last Photographs & Life Stories. New York: Blast Books, 2022
Walker Evans. Now and Then offers a renewed look at the career of one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century. In a broad anthology bringing together images made over more than fifty years, the exhibition invites viewers to rediscover the direct, restrained, and analytical gaze with which Evans documented everyday life in the United States. Far from the theatrical, the artist championed precise and honest photography, always attentive to the cultural and social context.
The exhibition is structured around several essential threads of his work: his interest in the signs of the city (shop signs, storefronts, billboards, etc.), through which Evans captured a compelling reflection of the collective identity of his era; anonymous individuals (pedestrians, subway riders, workers), whom he portrayed with a spontaneity that blends formal precision and deep respect for his subjects; and his fascination with modest environments and small towns, where he found an authenticity that large cities tended to obscure. Alongside these major axes of his oeuvre, the exhibition also presents his late experiments with the Polaroid camera, which reveal a more intimate shift without losing the clarity of his vision.
The photographer Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri, 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975) is an essential figure of modern photography and one of the great visual chroniclers of the United States during the twentieth‑century. His images, seemingly simple yet profoundly complex, lucidly portray everyday life, urban landscapes, and the anonymous faces of a country in transformation. Rooted in the documentary style, Evans combined a direct, austere gaze with an inexhaustible curiosity for the signs of popular culture, which led him to define an era even as he questioned it.
Walker Evans began his work in photography in the 1920s, after a stay in Paris; and over the course of his extensive career, which spanned more than fifty years, he produced some of the most recognized photographs in the medium. He explored a wide range of subjects, from street snapshots taken surreptitiously to meticulous and precise architectural studies, although his best‑known photographs remain those he made in the American South beginning in the 1930s. Evans also embraced new artistic and technical developments, and toward the end of his life he explored the possibilities offered by the Polaroid camera. What unified his entire body of work was a deep interest in and affection for the appearance and essence of everyday life in a society increasingly obsessed with the new and the immediate.
Evans remains, even today, one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century. With a style that is both simple and analytical, his deeply careful way of photographing, resulting in elegant compositions that are free of rigidity, has attracted countless followers. In addition to being an extraordinary photographer, Evans was also an editor, writer, and designer, and he took great care in how his work reached the public through magazines, books, and exhibitions, personally involving himself in the process.
In 2009 Fundación Mapfre launched its photography program with a retrospective dedicated to Walker Evans. Seventeen years later, the institution is pleased to present a new exhibition curated by David Campany, creative director of the International Center of Photography in New York. The show offers an extensive review of his work and of his lasting influence on generations of artists. It brings together key photographs and projects spanning his entire career – from his self‑portraits of the 1920s to his Polaroid experiments in the 1970s – alongside books and publications that reflect his inexhaustible capacity for observation. Through these works, the exhibition reveals a creator who not only documented the world around him, but also invited viewers to question the role of photography.
Key Themes
Signs of the city
Walker Evans stood out for deliberately and systematically incorporating all kinds of urban signage into his photographs – from sophisticated commercial signs to handmade notices, billboards, and shop windows – unlike other photographers of his generation, who often excluded them in pursuit of a supposed aesthetic purity. Evans believed these signs were reflections of society and its values; in this sense, his work resonates with artistic movements such as Pop Art and Postmodernism. His images of signs not only explore the relationship between word and image, but also question the role of photography as art, document, and commercial tool, underscoring the need for dialogue between photography and popular culture.
Anonymous people, anonymous places
Walker Evans showed no interest in portraying celebrities; on the contrary, he was always drawn to the anonymous individuals he encountered on the street or in the subway. He created portraits with a lightweight camera, privileging the spontaneity of isolated figures, crowds, beach scenes, or laborers at work. In this way, the simplicity of what he believed photography should be was reflected in the subjects he chose: a detached, direct, and unadorned kind of photography with carefully composed images that were nonetheless profoundly lyrical.
Tradition and the urban
One of Walker Evans’s core convictions was that the true character of any society was revealed more clearly in small towns than in large cities, which tended to blur individual particularities and traits. This emphasis on the popular and the vernacular set against the standardisation produced by major industries in big cities and metropolitan centers lies at the heart of American culture. Some of Evans’s finest and most celebrated photographs emerged from this belief, resulting in images of small‑town train stations and railcars, wooden buildings, traditional grocery stores and gas stations, as well as quintessential objects such as old pliers, rocking chairs, and fire hydrants.
Walker Evans information and keys from Fundación Mapfre
Sometimes a great photograph is a gift of time and space. Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York, was taken from the United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, New York, in 1931. Had Evans asked for a room with a picture perfect view? Or did the view only look perfect in Evans’s picture taken on that day, at the moment? The scene has something of the proportioned urban vistas he would have seen on his European trip in 1926. There is something Parisian here.
Recent rain has presented a dreamy shimmer. The light is coming from the clearing weather in the distance. The slick road looks almost like a canal and blends into the sky. In neat rows the shiny automobiles are all black. The filigree of tree branches doodles across the frame.
Although this is one of Evans’s best known and cherished images, the vision of pictorial and social harmony is unusual. No screeching billboards or shop signs. No tension on the street. Sometimes the modern world does offer a rare moment of equanimity.
The town of Ossining, where Walker Evans lived for a short time, lies up the Hudson River from Manhattan. He made many photographs there. His views of its hillside communities and single building were shot with a large format camera, but he also made a number of snapshots on the street with a 35 mm Leica. He was experimenting, figuring out what could be done with such lightweight and versatile equipment. It was around this time that Henri Cartier-Bresson began to work with a Leica in Europe. Evans took two photographs of this couple in their parked car. In the other exposure the woman is smelling, but Evans preferred the more wary expression he caught here (the stern gaze of women recurs in his work). This photograph was included in his book American Photographs and because a source of inspiration for younger photographers such as Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand.
Of all the celebrated photographers of the last century, the one who remains the most relevant today, and the one with the widest influence, is Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri 1903 – New Haven, Connecticut, 1975). His images, made in what he called the “documentary style”, are among the best known in the history of the medium. Direct and generous, analytical yet lyrical, carefully composed but unforced, his ways of photographing left the door open for countless others.
For a while, Evans’ reputation rested on the photographs he had made in the southern parts of the USA in the 1930s, but his achievement was wider than that. He worked with every camera format and photographed many subjects in different ways, from surreptitious street shots, to meticulous and exacting studies of architecture. He embraced new artistic and technical developments, and at the end of his life he explored what could be done with a Polaroid camera. What united it all was a deep interest in, and affection for, the look and feel of everyday life. In a culture increasingly obsessed with the new, Evans cherished things that were standing the test of time, be it a face or the facade of a warehouse.
Evans was also concerned with the ways photographic meaning is related to context, text, and relations between images, whether on the gallery wall, or on the pages of books and magazines. To be in control of one’s photographs means being in control how they are presented and circulated in the world. So, as well as being a remarkable image-maker, Evans was also an editor, writer and designer, shaping the way his work met its public. In this exhibition we see the range of Evans’ themes and approaches, and his understated resistance to the excesses and shallowness of so much American culture becomes clear.
A Young Modernist
Walker Evans spent most of 1926 in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne but struggling to become a writer. Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were his models, while he paid attention to contemporaries such as James Joyce and Blaise Cendrars. He made a handful photographs with a pocket camera, notably a series of self-portraits.
Returning to New York, Evans began to take photography seriously. He knew the city photographs of Ralph Steiner, Charles Sheeler, and especially Paul Strand. Their bold compositions presented Manhattan as a quintessentially modern metropolis. Evans was also aware of the ‘New Vision’ in European photography, with its enthusiastic embrace of modernist form, especially in architecture. He published a portfolio in the journal Architectural Record, and supplied three photographs from around the Brooklyn Bridge for a deluxe publication of Hart Crane’s epic poem The Bridge (1930).
The economic crash of October 1929 and the ensuing cultural turmoil sharpened the creative and political minds of all the ambitious artists of Evans’ generation. He soon stepped back from the celebration of the city to look hard at the lives of those who inhabited it.
A Past Without Nostalgia: Nineteenth Century Architecture
In 1931 Evans was commissioned by Lincoln Kirstein, a wealthy friend and supporter of the arts, to photograph Victorian houses in and around Boston. Two years later, the pictures were presented in the architecture room of the recently established Museum of Modern Art, New York. While Evans was credited, the context and display clearly put the emphasis on the architecture rather than Evans’ authorship. Nevertheless, in the press release for the exhibition, Kirstein noted:
Walker Evans’ photographs are perfect. They have been taken during the last four years and form the beginning of a photographic history of American domestic building during its most fantastic, imaginative, and impermanent period. Many of the houses, neglected and despised, have disappeared in the short period since these photographs were made. Evans worked in bright sunlight, forcing the details into utmost clarity. The focus was so sharpened that some of the houses seem to exist in an airless atmosphere such as Edward Hopper suggests in his painting of similar subjects. These houses were photographed in New England and New York.
Cultural artefacts endangered by contemporary tastes were already a key subject matter for Evans, one he would return to at various points.
Signs of Images, Images of Signs
Slick commercial signs, hand-made vernacular signs, street wayfinding signs, billboards, posters and shop fronts: if anything defines the time and place of an urban situation it is signage. While most photographers of Evans’ generation avoided or limited its presence in their images (searching for some kind of ‘purity’), he embraced it whole-heartedly. His fascination with signage, and his conviction that it has much to say about a society and its values, chimed with everything from the Pop Art that emerged at the end of the 1950s to the postmodern arts of quotation and appropriation that were emerging just as Evans was reaching the end of his life in 1975.
Evans’ photographs of signs seem highly reflexive, bringing photography itself into question as a medium of representation, while blurring the distinction between word and image. Photography may be a fine art, but it is also a means to make functional documents, and a vital tool of commerce. Whatever its aesthetic ambitions, Evans understood that serious photography would have to contend with its place in common culture.
Cuba
In 1933 Evans was on commission to photograph Havana and its environs for Carleton Beals’ book The Crime of Cuba. Beals was a journalist committed to exposing the corruption of Gerardo Machado’s brutal rule and America’s complicity with it. Cuba had gained independence back in 1902 but America reserved the right to interfere in its affairs, overseeing its finances and foreign relations.
Evans was not politically naïve. His street shots are a counterpoint to Beals’ high rhetoric of abstract political force and faceless conspiracy. And yet, his wary self-consciousness makes his pictures of people difficult to assess. His Cuba work continues to challenge critics and historians. Should we read it as the snaps of a curious tourist with a great eye for composition and social detail? Or might they register the slight tremors, the “mood on the street” of a tense society watching its back? Evans rarely presented his Cuban pictures after their moment had passed.
Anonymous & Incognito
Evans came into photography just as anonymity was becoming a touchstone of the modern era. Laborers on production lines. Isolated figures in the street. The crowd through which a wanderer might move unnoticed, or subject to the suspicious gaze of others. His early street portraits had much in common with those made by Eugène Atget in France and August Sander in Germany in the 1920s. Lightweight cameras soon made more candid portraits possible and Evans began to experiment, making serial photographs of New York subway passengers, and people on streets in various cities.
Evans worked through a period marked by increasing surveillance, and increasing presence of photography and photographers in daily life. It made him wary of the idea that people could be judged quickly by their appearance. His texts for ‘Labor Anonymous’ (Fortune, October 1946), and ‘The Unposed Portrait’ (Harper’s Bazaar, March 1962) push the reader to think again about the limits of photography.
Car Culture
In 1903 (the year Walker Evans was born) there were 4,000 cars in America. By 1930 there were 26.7 million: one for every 4.5 people. The transformation was breathless. Roadsides were redefined by billboards, gas stations, and motels. Towns and cities were designed or adapted for car use.
Evans enjoyed driving, and much of his photography beyond New York required a car. However, the rapid changes that cars were bringing to the appearance and the functioning of society left him feeling ambivalent. In the mass media at least, cars were the embodiment of optimism and mobility. Waste and despoilment were kept out of site, on the stage wings of progress. Evans’ view of rusting cars in a field (Joe’s Auto Graveyard, 1936) is a glimpse behind the scenes. This theme stayed with him for life. In 1962 he published a photo-essay in Fortune titled ‘The Auto Junkyard’, and in the 1970s, he also made many Polaroid photographs of cars and trucks rusting in fields.
Three Tenant Farmer Families
In the summer of 1936, the writer James Agee was commissioned to make a report on cotton farm tenancy in the American south. He chose Evans as his photographer. They committed to the project with great energy but while at work they barely overlapped. Evans recalled: “We lived with [the three families] for three weeks, as I remember it. We told them exactly what we were doing, and we worked intensely and separately. I didn’t see Agee. He was working all day interviewing and taking notes, and I was photographing.”
When Agee’s text was ten times longer than planned, Fortune dropped the project leaving him and Evans to pursue it as a book. Evans assembled a discrete sequence of thirty-one photos that would be set apart from the text, with no captions. Such radical separation of word and image stood against the tide of more conventional documentary practices. The resulting book, Let us now Praise Famous Men, finally appeared in 1941. Evans’ sequence shows him perfecting a way of seeing that was stoic and inscrutable, associative yet anti narrative, with images that eventually became some of the most famous of the era, and of his career.
Chicago
In late 1946, Evans opened a major solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. In February 1947, Fortune published his ambitious photo-essay ‘Chicago: a camera exploration’. Across ten pages he avoided the city’s “prized and remarkable postcard colossi” to show “sights that meet a leisured and untethered eye,” as he put it in his text for the piece. The layout looked celebratory but its tone was not: “Chicago decays as it does everything else – spectacularly and speedily.” The fourth spread is the most remarkable, showing citizens at the corner of State and Randolph Streets. These are post-war consumers, Caucasian, Asian and African-American. Evans places himself directly in their path. Trapped anxiously in bright sunlight the faces hint at the unrest beneath middle-class decorum.
Beyond street portraits, Evans made a comprehensive study of Chicago’s remarkably mixed architecture, allowing him to resume his ongoing interest in buildings as a kind of indirect portrait of a society. The Chicago photo-essay for Fortune was by far his most significant magazine work to date, giving him the confidence to develop and refine what he wanted to do with the printed page in the coming years.
Small Towns & Neighbourhoods
Although Evans’ photography began in New York and he made a substantial photographic portrait of Chicago, he remained convinced that it was the smaller towns that offered a more accurate sense of the nation. The major cities of the USA are always exceptional, and tend to think of themselves as such. Evans concerned himself with the typical, and with the pragmatic ways small towns work and grow. Away from intense modern progress, artefacts of the past persist until they no longer function, rather than being replaced for the sake of it. Some of Evans’ most loved and complex photographs came out of this commitment to typical places.
Message from the Interior
Evans’ deep interest in rooms was long-lasting, and it suited his slow and careful pace of observation. With no people present, an interior scene can become a portrait of an individual, a family, or a community. Moreover, the way a camera records will allow everything that is present to become significant, as in a still life composition. Details of décor. Treasured objects. Casual objects. Furniture. Fabrics. Even the atmosphere of a room can be communicated.
African Sculpture: an Art of Documentation
In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, commissioned Evans to document nearly five hundred sculptures gathered for an exhibition of African art. In the museum itself each object was shot separately (with a few objects documented in pairs) in long exposure, during which lights were sometimes moved around to produce an all-over, hyper-factual clarity. Prints were made for extensive teaching folios, and a travelling exhibition. The catalogue for MoMA’s exhibition African Negro Art (in which Evans is not credited) was a serious attempt to look at the origin and complexity of these objects beyond the crude reductions and exoticism of the attitudes of European surrealists and modernist artists of the time. Although it was a free-standing commission, we can view this work in the context of Evans’ earlier commission from the Museum of Modern Art to photograph Victorian architecture, as well commissions to document folk art at New York’s Downtown Gallery, and Diego Rivera’s political murals for the Workers’ School of New York.
Vernacular Designs, Common Objects
Evans took the forces of modernity and modernisation – economic, political, social, aesthetic – as a subject matter to be considered carefully. These forces could be sensed most acutely through objects that had somehow survived the onslaught of modernisation or were about to succumb to it. Even the titles of Evans’ Fortune magazine photo-essays signalled his suspicion of the new: ‘The Wreckers’, ‘These Dark Satanic Mills’, ‘Downtown: A Last Look Backward’, ‘Before they Disappear’, ‘The Last of Railroad Steam’, ‘The Auto-Junkyard’.
Nevertheless, it would be hasty to dismiss this as nostalgia, or a sentimental looking back in the knowledge that the juggernaut of progress could not be stopped. In 1956 Evans observed: “[N]ostalgia has become debased to mean a kind of syrup savoured by self-pitying people conjuring better days, funny hats and an innocence nobody ever had.” In a caption for a series of photographs of antique store window displays he declared: “Nostalgia I disdain: pray keep me forever separated from an atmosphere of moist elderly eyes just about to spill over at the sight of grandmother’s tea set. Design just a little dated will interest any artist. Design current is always terrible. Anyone who has tried to find a good contemporary lamp or clock will know what I mean.”
Walker Evans, ‘Before They Disappear’, Fortune, March 1957
The familiar insignia of the freight cars are like old ditties beating in the back of our heads. Once we knew them all by heart, they were with us like the weather, like the backs of books we collected, and like the streets we walked in.
Brought into focus by selection, you almost expect these brave and naïve emblems to emit the very sound of railroading – the iron whines, the Steely screechers, and the attenuated nocturnal moans of steam transportation.
They don’t quite do that. But they are worth examining, not only for the commemorative thoughts they carry, but because they are going to disappear from the US landscape one day you have only to notice the new, exceedingly distinguished lettering of the New Haven’s car sides, or the redesigned Boston & Maine signature, to see that the fell hand of the contemporary commercial designer is lurking near, T-square poised.
When we can no longer catch sight of the great Chinese red and black double tadpole of the Northern Pacific, or the simple old cross of the Santa Fe, then will a whole world of cherished association have been destroyed. Impiety could go no further.
Walker Evans, ‘The Auto Junkyard’, Fortune, April 1962
The nadir of landscape scenery is the great American auto-junk scrap pile. With the effect of some evil prank, these obscene perversities leer out of the countryside almost anywhere, often in the middle of idyllic rural spots … Pictorially speaking, the result is chaos abstracted, and this has considerable curious interest in itself. There is a secret imp in almost every civilized man that bids him delight in the surprises and in the mockery in the forms of destruction. At times, nothing could be gayer than the complete collapse of our fanciest contrivances. Scenes like these are rich in tragicomic suggestions of the fall of man from his high ride.
Walker Evans, ‘The U.S. Depot’‚ Fortune, February 1953
He who travels by rail over the lesser lines of the USA clangs and shunts straight into his own childhood. Most of the smalltown railroad stations up and down the country are now about fifty years old. Looked at collectively they seem more and more toylike – as model railroad toys grow more and more like the real thing. With only a slight effort of the imagination, these encrusted little buildings turn into miniature stage sets, and the people in them correctly costumed dolls. You feel an old affection for the way a station agent throws the block-signal lever there in his coal-heated office. And what in that green-paper note handed up on its looped stick to the engineer as the 3:52 breaks to a stop? Does it say “Train five Engine eight four nine six delayed at Millerton hot journal box,” or does it say “Tell Jeanie I’ll get pork chops?”
Walker Evans, ‘Beauties of the Common Tool’, Fortune, July 1955
Among the low-priced, factory-produced goods, none is so appealing to the senses as the ordinary hand tool. Hence, a hardware store is a kind of offbeat museum show for the man who responds to good, clear “undesigned” forms. The Swedish steel pliers pictured above, with their somehow swanlike flow, and the objects on the following pages, in all their tough simplicity, illustrate this. Aside from their functions – though they are exclusively wedded to function – each of these tools lures the eye to follow its curves and angles, and invites the hand to test its balance.
Who would sully the lines of the tin-cutting shears on page 105 with a single added bend or whorl? Or clothe in any way the fine naked impression of heft and bite in the crescent wrench on page 107? To be sure, some design-happy manufacturers have tampered with certain tool classics; the beautiful plumb bob, which used to come naively and solemnly shaped like a child’s top, now looks suspiciously like a toy space ship, and is no longer brassy. But not much can be done to spoil a crate opener, that nobly ferocious statement in black steel as may be seen on page 104. In fact, almost all the basic small tools stand, aesthetically speaking, for elegance, candour and purity.
Labor Anonymous is a 1946 photo series by Walker Evans, commissioned by Fortune magazine, documenting 50+ candid, close-up street portraits of Detroit workers. Capturing diverse, unposed facial expressions and postures, the project created a “physiognomy of a nation,” exploring modern anonymity and the dignity of laborers.
Shot on assignment for Fortune magazine in 1946, this Walker Evans photograph of an unknown Detroit office worker is reproduced from Labor Anonymous, just out from D.A.P. Publishing and Walther König. “When I knew him, Evans was beset by troubles of all kinds,” Jerry L Thompson writes, “money troubles, tax troubles, marriage troubles (he divorced a second time in 1972), health troubles, advancing age, declining strength: the full catastrophe that flesh is heir to. As he approached 70, most onlookers would have taken him (even by the standards of that time) to be at least a decade older. Yet every time he walked out to start his day he was ready to be an artist. Every day had some work in it – for Evans, work meant being an artist – and the work got done even if every practical concern – what ordinary people call work – fell by the wayside.”
Evans was in poor health when he began to work with the Polaroid SX-70 in 1973; he was attracted to the camera’s small, elegant design and the instant color prints it generated that required no tedious lab or darkroom work. Like the developing Polaroid print itself, with its miraculous and immediate image, Evans came to life and worked feverishly with the new camera. At the age of seventy, he returned to many of his lifelong themes, including vernacular architecture, domestic interiors, portraiture, and roadside signage.
Text from The Metropolitan Museum of Art website
KBr Fundación MAPFRE Av. del Litoral, 30 08005 Barcelona Phone: +34 932 723 180
Picture this is what Walker Evans does in his unique, forthright way.
He shows you what he is seeing in a very straight forward way – directly, purposefully, in images where the artist seems to have no presence, no ego to impart.
As artist Chris Killip observes, “Walker Evans is serious and smart and purposeful. He is trying to show you very clearly what he is seeing. It is very unadorned, as if nobody had taken the photograph. He conveys what is in front of him as clearly as possible.”1
But further than this, Evans presents us with a photographic version of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems which were seen by his English admirers in terms of “deep image”, a vaguely Jungian concept which suggests that “poetry could state absolute truths if only the images poets evoked welled up from deep enough sources uncontaminated by history and the follies of reason.”2
Evans direct, plainspoken images picture reality whilst hovering above the void – flirting with the duality of narrative truth and metaphysical inquiry. Whether Evans was consciously aware of this elemental antinomy is unlikely. Nevertheless we can read it in his images, even if we cannot read it in his prosaic words. You only have to look at the jet-black trees on a rainy day in Main Street, Saratoga Springs, New York (1931, below), or the justly famous Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (March 1936, below).
The people in the photograph have been posed but there is an intimate relationship here between the artist and his subjects. It is a loving photograph, for Evans cares for the dignity of these people in their naked condition. The grandmother wary of the camera with clasped hands, the weary husband, stick thin with glazed eyes, the young girl child with sallow stare, and the pensive mother with sleeping baby staring directly into camera, all of them dirty and in rags. In this absolute reality there is a nobility to these people and there, buried in the image, a relationship to the metaphysical essence of what it is to be human – the pictures of children on the back wall with text I can’t quite make out; the glorious arrangement of feet that run along the bottom of the image in all different angles and positions, the mothers folded under her almost collapsing with the weight of her burden; and what is that black shape prostrate on the floor? A rag? death? No! A cat.
The blackest most thinnest small cat that you ever seen, lingering on the edge of starvation, hovering in the void of existence.
As Thomas Sleigh writes of his first meeting with Tomas Tranströmer as he stepped from a small plane onto the ground, “I don’t mind large planes or middle-sized planes (his English was slightly guttural, his intonations lilting in a mild brogue), but small planes – you feel too much of the air under you.”3
And so with Evans if you know where to look.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
PS. For a fascinating insight into how these photographs were hung in the 1938 exhibition at MoMA see installation views of “Walker Evans American Photographs” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1938 on the ASX website. Notice the smallness of the photographs, their different sizes, the juxtaposition of disparate images, some double or triple hung one above the other, some printed in the centre of white sheets of photographic paper, others displayed on dark walls. The image that I describe above, Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (March 1936) is shown in an installation photograph below. Notice how small the image is and what affect this size of image has on the viewer, its shear concentration and intensity.
A friend Christopher Young tells me, “The install was done by Evans himself the night before and very chaotically. I love the poetry of the 1938 opening in that he got to the front door and couldn’t enter the show. He instead circled the block a number of times before going home…” Sounds like my early exhibitions. I could be found next door in a cafe playing pinball, I couldn’t face the crowd!
Footnotes
1/ Interview with Chris Killip about his exhibition Work at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia, October 2013 [Online] Cited 11/02/2021
2/ Sleigh, Tom. “Too Much of the Air: Tomas Tranströmer,” 2005, on the Poets.org website [Online] Cited 15/02/2014. No longer available online
3/ Ibid.,
Many thankx to The Museum of Modern Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Church Organ and Pews, Alabama 1936 Gelatin silver print, printed 1970 7 9/16 x 9 1/8″ (19.2 x 23.2cm) Printer: James Dow Mr. and Mrs. John Spencer Fund
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama March 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.4 x 24.4cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (detail) March 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.4 x 24.4cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) Sharecropper’s Family, Hale County, Alabama (detail) March 1936 Gelatin silver print 7 5/8 x 9 5/8″ (19.4 x 24.4cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
This installation celebrates the 75th anniversary of the first one-person photography exhibition in MoMA’s history, and the accompanying landmark publication, which established the potential of the photographer’s book as an indivisible work of art. Through these projects Walker Evans created a collective portrait of the eastern United States during a decade of profound transformation – one that coincided with the flood of everyday images, both still and moving, from an expanding mass culture, and the construction of a Modernist history of photography. As Lincoln Kirstein wrote in his essay for the book, “After looking at these pictures with all their clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur, compare this vision of a continent as it is, not as it might be or as it was, with any other coherent vision that we have had since the war. What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much? Only newspapers, the writers of popular music, the technicians of advertising and radio have in their blind energy accidentally, fortuitously, evoked for future historians such a powerful monument to our moment. And Evans’s work has, in addition, logic, continuity, climax, sense and perfection.”
Comprising approximately 60 prints from the Museum’s collection that were included in the 1938 exhibition or the accompanying publication, the current installation maintains the bipartite presentation of the originals; the first section portrays American society through images of its individuals and social environments, while the second consists of photographs of the relics that constitute expressions of an American cultural identity – the architecture of Main streets, factory towns, rural churches, and wooden houses. The pictures provide neither a coherent narrative nor a singular meaning, but rather create connections through the repetition and interplay of pictorial structures and subject matter. Its placement on the fourth floor of the Museum – between galleries featuring the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jackson Pollock, and Andy Warhol – underscores the continuation of prewar avant-garde practices in America and the unique legacy of Evans’s explorations of signs and symbols, commercial culture, and the vernacular. Their profound impact on not only photography, but also film, literature, and the visual arts, reverberates today.
Text from The Museum of Modern Art website
Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) American Legionnaire 1936 Gelatin silver print 5 3/4 x 5 1/8″ (14.6 x 13cm) Gift of the Farm Security Administration
Many thankx to the Fotomuseum Winterthur for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
With this retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) Fotomuseum Winterthur presents one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent photographers. His lucid and detailed portrayals of American life, especially his images of rural poverty during the Great Depression, made photographic history and went on to influence countless photographers. Walker Evans took an extremely innovative approach, capturing the very essence of the American way of life.
The exhibition, featuring some 120 works (the majority of which are from the most important private collection of Walker Evans’ works) represents every phase of his career: his early street photographs of the 1920s, his poignant documentation of 1930s America and pre-revolutionary Cuba, his landscapes and architectural photography, his subway portraits, storefronts, signage, the later colour Polaroids and more besides. As early as the 1930s, Walker Evans, in a departure from conventional notions of art and style, sought a new direct approach to reality. It is this that makes him a truly modern photographer.
The exhibition was curated by Jeff L. Rosenheim and Carlos Gollonet. Realisation in Winterthur: Urs Stahel. A cooperation with the Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid.
With this major retrospective of the work of Walker Evans (1903-1975) Fotomuseum Winterthur pays homage to one of the twentieth century’s pre-eminent photographers. His insightful and detailed portrayals of American life, especially his images of rural poverty during the Great Depression, made photographic history and went on to influence countless photographers. The 130 works in this retrospective exhibition represent every phase of his career: his early street photographs of the 1920s, his poignant documentation of 1930s America and pre-revolutionary Cuba, his landscapes and architectural photography, his subway portraits, storefronts, signage, and more besides.
On his return from France, where he had tried unsuccessfully to launch a literary career inspired by his love of Flaubert and Baudelaire, Walker Evans turned to photography. From the very start, with his keen eye for street life and the visual freshness of his unexpected slant on what he saw, his work spoke the language of European Modernism. But it was not long before Evans found his true voice – and it was at once profoundly personal and unequivocally American.
Some years before, the direct, undistorted and innovative gaze of Eugène Atget (1857-1927), whose work Evans knew and admired, had quietly paved the way for the split between documentary auteur photography and the purely descriptive photographic tradition. Atget’s unconventional angles, his de-centralised view and his focus on the seemingly trivial all had a major impact on Evans.
Walker Evans’ work is a far remove from what had, until then, been accepted as art photography. He was not interested in superficial beauty, but in a new objectivity. He subscribed to a style that observed undistorted facts and sought to capture things precisely as they were, seemingly without intervention, emotion or idealisation. For the first time in art photography, there were such unusual subjects as a pair of old boots or a subway passenger lost in thought. The artistic quality was based solely on the clarity, intelligence and authenticity of the photographer’s gaze. In this, Walker Evans’ oeuvre represents both a high point and a turning point in the formal and visual evolution of photography.
As the creator of this new, direct style, often referred to as straight photography, which drew upon scenes of sometimes blatant banality and rolled back the boundaries between the ‘important’ and the ‘trivial’, Walker Evans introduced the aesthetics of Modernism into American photography. This seemingly cold detachment spawned a style rich in expressive substance that was not only capable of embracing the lyricism and complexity of the American tradition, but of doing so without a trace of false romanticism, sentimentality or nostalgia. At long last, there was a forward-looking and enduring alternative to the traditional conventions of photography.
Press release from the Fotomuseum Winterthur website [Online] Cited 05/06/2009. No longer available online. Used under fair use conditions for the purposes of education and research
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-shadow-self-portrait-juan-les-pins-france.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Shadow Self-portrait, Juan-les-Pins, France]' 1927 from the exhibition 'Walker Evans. Now and Then' at Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, February - May, 2026")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
'[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/3428-018-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Subway Passengers, New York]' 1938")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/walker-evans-boarded-up-house-stonington-connecticut.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Boarded-up House, Stonington, Connecticut]' 1974")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Detail of Stencilled Lettering on Yellow Railroad Car: "DO NOT HUMP"]' September 16, 1974](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/evans-do-not-hump-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Detail of Stencilled Lettering on Yellow Railroad Car: \"DO NOT HUMP\"]' September 16, 1974")
![Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Fireplace in Floyd Burrroughs's Bedroom with Bedpost in Foreground, Hale County, Alabama]' 1936](https://artblart.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/walker-evans-fireplace-web.jpg "Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975) '[Fireplace in Floyd Burrroughs's Bedroom with Bedpost in Foreground, Hale County, Alabama]' 1936")
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