Walker Evans

Private collection, West Coast

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, 2006

Keller 533

Walker Evans: Photographs for the Farm Security Administration 1935-1938 (New York, 1973), pl. 250

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

Walker Evans, American Photographs (The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988), pl. 14

Allie Mae Burroughs and her husband Floyd were two of the subjects included by Walker Evans and James Agee in their landmark publication Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941. This classic, illustrated volume examines the daily lives of the families of three tenant farmers: Burroughs, Frank Tingle, and Bud Fields. The men and their families were loosely related by a meanderingly woven family tree, each tending neighboring fields in Hale County, Alabama. Occupying the second and third plates in the book, Evans’ portraits of the Burroughs husband and wife are regarded as two of his most arresting images – Floyd’s portrait even gracing the covers of multiple editions in the book’s printing.

Frequently, Evans made multiple negatives of his subjects, affording him the flexibility to revisit his work later in order to select the best images for printing. In keeping with this practice, Evans made four slightly different 8 x 10 inch negatives of Allie Mae. In the more commonly reproduced image, the hard lines of Allie Mae’s face are apparent, her drawn mouth and furrowed brow unflinchingly confronting the viewer, evidence of her persistence and endurance. In the present portrait, Evans has captured Allie Mae in a rare moment of tranquility, her face more relaxed, with the possible hint of a smile on her lips. Although the variant image was used in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, it was this image that Evans chose as representative for the series and for submission to the Farm Security Administration.

Akin to Dorothea Lange’s eponymous Migrant Mother, depicting a destitute pea picker surrounded by her children on a farmstead in California, Evans’s image of Allie Mae would go on to serve as a visual representation of this period of American history. As Lincoln Kirstein, Evans’ friend, patron, and occasional subject (see Lot 36) soliloquized in an essay for the American Photographs publication, “The pictures of men and portraits of houses have only that ‘expression’ which the experience of their society and times has imposed on them. 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.”

Early prints of this image are exceptionally rare. At the time of this writing, only two other early prints of this image are believed to have appeared at auction.