About This Artwork

Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975

Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936

Gelatin silver print
21.6 x 17.7 cm
Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne, 1962.148

Walker Evans was remarkably adept at straddling the cultural divide between documentary photography and the museum. One of several photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the Depression, Evans made some of his most famous images in the summer of 1936: pictures of impoverished families in Hale County, Alabama, later published in his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Just two years later, he was honored with a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which had only recently embraced photography as an art form. This image of the many portraits in a photographer’s studio—an homage to the workaday photographer and the faces of ordinary Americans—became, in the context of a museum exhibition, a statement about the art and meaning of photography.

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

AIC, "Hot Streaks," February 21 - May 2, 2004, (David Travis).

New York, NY, Whitney Museum of American Art, "Walker Evans/Dan Graham," December 17, 1993 -March 21, 1994.

AIC, "Photography on Display: Modern Treasures," May 9–September 13, 2009.

Publication History

Keller, Judith. 1995. "Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection." The J. Paul Getty Museum. p. 161. pl. 517.
(Other print of this image)

Westerbeck, Colin and Joel Meyerowitz. 1994. "Bystander: A History of Street Photography." Little, Brown and Company: Hong Kong. p. 297. fig. 14.6.