Penny Picture Display, Savannah

Photography and Media

1936, printed c. 1962

Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975

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.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Photography and Media

Artist: Walker Evans
Title: Penny Picture Display, Savannah
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: No markings recto or verso
Dimensions: Image/paper/first mount: 21.7 × 17.7 cm (8 9/16 × 7 in.); Second mount: 45.7 × 35.3 cm (18 × 13 15/16 in.)
Credit Line: Purchased with funds provided by Mrs. James Ward Thorne
Reference Number: 1962.148
IIIF Manifest The International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) represents a set of open standards that enables rich access to digital media from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions around the world. Learn more.: https://api.artic.edu/api/v1/artworks/88584/manifest.json

Westerbeck, Colin and Joel Meyerowitz. 1994. “Bystander: A History of Street Photography.” Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown and Company. p. 279. fig. 14.6. (either this or 1983.1489)

Art Institute of Chicago, “Master Photographers from the Permanent Collection,” February 14-June 10, 1984.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Hot Streaks,” February 21-May 2, 2004. (David Travis).
Rotterdam, Netherlands, Witte de With, “Walker Evans/Dan Graham,” August 29–October 11, 1992; traveled to Marseille, France, Musee Cantini, November 6, 1992–January 10, 1993; Munster, Germany, Westfalisches Landesmuseum fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, February 14–March 28, 1993; and New York, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, December 17, 1993 -March 21, 1994.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Photography on Display: Modern Treasures,” May 9–September 13, 2009.
Art Institute of Chicago, “In the Vernacular,” February 6–May 31, 2010. (Greg Harris)
Art Institute of Chicago, “The Photographer’s Curator: Hugh Edwards at the Art Institute of Chicago, 1959-1970,” May 24-October 29, 2017. (Elizabeth Siegel)
Art Institute of Chicago, “Photography + Folk Art: Looking for America in the 1930s,” September 21, 2019–January 19, 2020. (Galleries 1–4) (Elizabeth Siegel and Elizabeth McGoey)

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.