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Lot Essay
Lots 138, 139 and 143 are the property of Adam Lewis, who served as Evans' personal assistant while he was a graduate student in the Yale school of Art and Architecture from 1967 to 1969. These prints were personal gifts from Evans to Lewis during this period.
Lots 138 and 139 appear on facing pages as they did in Evans and James Agee's collaborative work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of 1941. The images throughout the book, and in particular those seen in lot 139 and 143, have become, for many, synonymous with the Great Depression and the rural south of 1930s America. Most notably, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs) has transcended this period, like Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California made the same year, becoming an icon of a time and place in American history.
In his essay in American Photographs, the catalogue which accompanied Evans' 1936 landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Kirstein observed, "There has been no need for Evans to dramatize his material with photographic tricks, because the material is already, in itself, intensely dramatic...The faces, even those tired, vicious or content, are past reflecting accidental emotions. They are isolated and essentialized. The power of Evans' work lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets." (op. cit., p. 197.)
Early prints of this image are considered rare.
Lots 138 and 139 appear on facing pages as they did in Evans and James Agee's collaborative work, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men of 1941. The images throughout the book, and in particular those seen in lot 139 and 143, have become, for many, synonymous with the Great Depression and the rural south of 1930s America. Most notably, Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife (Allie Mae Burroughs) has transcended this period, like Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California made the same year, becoming an icon of a time and place in American history.
In his essay in American Photographs, the catalogue which accompanied Evans' 1936 landmark exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Kirstein observed, "There has been no need for Evans to dramatize his material with photographic tricks, because the material is already, in itself, intensely dramatic...The faces, even those tired, vicious or content, are past reflecting accidental emotions. They are isolated and essentialized. The power of Evans' work lies in the fact that he so details the effect of circumstances on familiar specimens that the single face, the single house, the single street, strikes with the strength of overwhelming numbers, the terrible cumulative force of thousands of faces, houses and streets." (op. cit., p. 197.)
Early prints of this image are considered rare.