Walker Evans 1903-1975

the photographer's name (Keller B) and Arnold H. Crane Collection (Keller, xvii) stamps and with annotations and numerical notations in unidentified hands in pencil and a Metropolitan Museum of Art collection stamp on the reverse, 1936

Acquired by Arnold H. Crane, Chicago, from the photographer, late 1960s

Gift of Arnold H. Crane to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1972

Other prints of this image:

Keller 532

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

John T. Hill, Walker Evans at Work (New York, 1982), p. 127

Walker Evans: First and Last (New York, 1978), p. 73

Gilles Mora and John T. Hill, Walker Evans: The Hungry Eye (New York, 1993), pp. 177 and 202

Maria Morris Hambourg, Jeff L. Rosenheim, Douglas Eklund, and Mia Fineman, Walker Evans (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 89

Emma Dexter and Thomas Weski, eds., Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth-Century Photograph (London: Tate Modern, 2003), p. 133

Chris Bruce and Andy Grundberg, After Art: Rethinking 150 Years of Photography, Selections from the Joseph and Elaine Monsen Collection (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1994), p. 97

Walker Evans’s iconic portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs is illustrated in Evans’s and James Agee’s book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, appearing in both the first edition of 1941, and the second edition of 1960.   In the book, this image is juxtaposed with the photograph of Allie Mae’s husband, Floyd Burroughs (see Lot 56).  Together, they are two of the definitive portraits in the book. 

Agee and Evans originally started the work that would become Let Us Now Praise Famous Men as an article for Fortune magazine.  The writer and photographer stayed with the Burroughs family in their home in Hale County, Alabama, while doing their fieldwork for the project.  During this stay, Evans made four portraits of Allie Mae Burroughs against the pine clapboard backdrop of the family’s four-room house (cf. Walker Evans at Work, p. 127).  Each portrait captures Allie Mae with a slightly different facial expression.  While Evans chose a variant of the image offered here for inclusion in his book, American Photographs, his selection of the present image for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men – in which Allie Mae confronts the camera with a steely gaze -- is consonant with the overall intensity of the work.  Evans authority Jeff Rosenheim notes that this image was singled out by critics Robert Fitzgerald and Lionel Trilling ‘as the book’s quintessential image’ (Walker Evans, p. 90).