During the summer of 1936, Walker Evans joined writer James Agee in rural Alabama to work on a magazine assignment on cotton farming. Evans and Agee met with three tenant farm families and documented details of their experiences. The result, which the magazine declined to publish, was released as the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men in 1941. It contains some of the most iconic and contentious photographs to document the Great Depression.
Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead reads like a modern novel. Every crack in the wood, every speck of paint tells part of the story. Evans drew special attention to the scarcity of cooking tools at the family’s disposal. These everyday utensils provide a metaphor for the struggle to meet basic needs.
A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2013
Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead reads like a modern novel. Every crack in the wood, every speck of paint tells part of the story. Evans drew special attention to the scarcity of cooking tools at the family’s disposal. These everyday utensils provide a metaphor for the struggle to meet basic needs.
A Democracy of Images: Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2013
- Title
-
Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead
- Artist
- Printers
- Publisher
- Date
- 1936, printed 1974
- Location
- Not on view
- Dimensions
- sheet and image: 9 3⁄8 x 12 in. (23.9 x 30.5 cm)
- Credit Line
-
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Gift of Lee and Maria Friedlander
- Mediums Description
- gelatin silver print
- Classifications
- Keywords
-
- Architecture – farm
- Landscape – Alabama
- Architecture Interior – domestic – kitchen
- Object Number
-
2006.13.1.8
- Palette
- Linked Open Data
- Linked Open Data URI
