Walker Evans: Six Photographs That Ask for a Closer Look

Bud Fields and members of his family appear together inside their house. The chairs, bare boards and closely arranged figures supply information a tight portrait cannot. This picture belongs to the Alabama work Evans undertook with James Agee, which reached readers in book form in 1941 rather than through the original magazine assignment.

Painted signs cover the front of a small roadside business near Birmingham. Evans’s camera gives lettering, timber and merchandise the same careful attention he gives to faces. The signs were made to attract customers; in the photograph they also preserve the appearance of an ordinary business that might otherwise leave little visual record.

A bicycle rests beside the front of a shoeshine business. Painted lettering names Bennie Sims and advertises the service, while a large boot marks the sign. Evans photographed this workplace in the southeastern United States in 1936; the record does not establish a more precise town. Its everyday advertising receives the same attention as the building itself.

The archive identifies this small wooden structure as a prayer meeting house on Frank Tengle’s farm. Its unpainted boards and simple entrance are the subject. Alongside the family portraits, a building like this helps place social and religious life within the Alabama series. The catalog dates this exposure to June 1936.

Evans’s November 1935 view places a cemetery in front of Bethlehem’s houses and industrial buildings. The picture joins spaces often photographed separately: a place of burial, a neighborhood and a workplace. The underlying photograph is a federal public-domain work; this distributed digital version is credited under the uploader’s stated Creative Commons license.