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A Child's Grave, Hale County, Alabama

A work made of gelatin silver print.

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  • A work made of gelatin silver print.

Date:

1936

Artist:

Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975

About this artwork

Walker Evans perfected a dispassionate documentary approach to photography that was concise yet often poetic. Among his best known pictures are those he made on a 1936 trip to Hale County, Alabama, with writer James Agee, to record the lives of three impoverished tenant farmer families during the Depression. Evans’s photographs and Agee’s lengthy text were eventually published as the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee devoted a short chapter to a local graveyard, noting the improvised nature of markers on the poorest of the burial sites, including pine boards, glasses, and old crockery. Evans photographed several such graves (a different image than this was included in the book); in this picture, he dramatically cropped the print from a full negative in order to echo the horizontal shape of the grave itself, underscoring with little flourish the poignant nature of his subject.

Status

Currently Off View

Department

Photography and Media

Artist

Walker Evans

Title

A Child's Grave, Hale County, Alabama

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

Made 1936

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Inscriptions

Unmarked recto; verso unchecked

Dimensions

Image/paper: 8.4 × 23.1 cm (3 5/16 × 9 1/8 in.)

Credit Line

Purchased with funds provided by Lucia Woods Lindley and Daniel A. Lindley, Jr.

Reference Number

1987.235

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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