Walker Evans

A first edition copy of Walker Evans' American Photographs.

• Walker Evans (American).
• With an essay by Lincoln Kirstein.
• New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1938.
• 198 pages.
• Quarto.
• With black-and-white photographs printed in relief halftone by The Spiral Press, New York, from plates made by Beck Engraving Company.
• Bound in black cloth-covered boards, with cream endpapers, border in blind, printed title-label mounted on spine, in printed dust jacket, grey with text in black.

In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition of Evans' photographs, the first exhibition at the museum to be devoted to the work of a single photographer. Evans worked closely with Lincoln Kirstein on the edit and sequence of the photographs, both for the exhibition and in the accompanying book American Photographs, for which Kirstein also provided the essay. Kirstein writes, "In Evans's pictures of temples or shelters the presence or absence of the people who created them is the most important thing… The structures are social rather than artistic monuments. The photographs are social documents!"

Evans and Kirstein divided the book into two thoughtfully sequenced sections. The first shows American citizens, or their representations, alone, in groups, and often within the context of their built environments. The second shows these environments and comprises the "streets and storefronts, homes and graveyards, industrial plants and roadside stands [that] are frozen in time, many of them in a permanent state of decay."