Walker Evans 1903-1975

on a modern mount, the photographer's 'Box 310, Rte. 3, Old Lyme, Conn. 06371' studio stamp, Lunn Gallery stamp numbered 'II' and '83,' reproduction rights stamps, and annotated 'please return the print to,' possibly by the photographer, and 'MoMA 83' in an unidentified hand in pencil on a section of the original mount affixed to the reverse, matted, 1936

Nina Rosenwald

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1978

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Evans, February - May 2000; and traveling to:

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, June - September 2000

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, December 2000 - March 2001

Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, and Mia Fineman, Walker Evans (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), pl. 88 (this print)

Other prints of this image:

John Szarkowski, Walker Evans (The Museum of Modern Art, 1971), p. 83

Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938 (New York, 1973), pl. 249

Keller 531

James Agee and Walker Evans, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (Boston, 1988 edition), cover and unpaginated

John T. Hill, Walker Evans at Work (New York, 1982), p. 126

Walker Evans: First and Last (New York, 1978), p. 72

Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (New York, 1993), p. 202

Thomas W. Southall, Of Time & Place: Walker Evans and William Christenberry (Amon Carter Museum and University of New Mexico Press, 1990), p. 35

Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, eds., Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (London: Tate Modern, 2003), p. 132

This image of the Alabama farmer Floyd Burroughs was reproduced in both the first edition of Walker Evans’s and James Agee’s volume Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941, as well as in the second of 1960.  This now classic book describes, in words and photographs, the daily lives of the families of three tenant farmers, Floyd Burroughs, Frank Tingle, and Bud Fields.  All three men were cotton farmers, all loosely related, and worked land adjacent to one another in Alabama’s Hale County.  The portrait of Floyd Burroughs offered here, and that of his wife, Allie Mae (see Lot 57), are two of the definitive images in the book.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men began with an assignment for Fortune magazine.  During the hardest years of the Depression, Fortune ran a number of articles on the life and circumstances of the working class.  For the fourth article in the series, James Agee was assigned to document the lives of Southern cotton tenant farmers.  Agee, excited by the prospect of returning to his native south, took the assignment and arranged for Evans to come along as his photographer.  In the fall of 1936 the article was submitted to Fortune and promptly rejected by the editors.  Not to be discouraged, Evans searched for a publisher, and Agee continued to write, the text growing to book size.  After five years, the book was published by Houghton Mifflin to much critical success, but lackluster sales.  It was not until after Agee’s death, in 1955, and his posthumously-awarded Pulitzer Prize for A Death in the Family, that the book was republished and hailed for its detailed and unsparing portrayal of Southern life during the Depression.