[Floyd and Lucille Burroughs on Porch, Hale County, Alabama]

Artist:: Walker Evans (American, St. Louis, Missouri 1903–1975 New Haven, Connecticut)

Date:: 1936

Medium:: Gelatin silver print

Dimensions:: 18.9 x 23.7 cm (7 7/16 x 9 5/16 in.)

Classification:: Photographs

Credit Line:: Purchase, Marlene Nathan Meyerson Family Foundation Gift, in memory of David Nathan Meyerson; and Pat and John Rosenwald and Lila Acheson Wallace Gifts, 1999

Accession Number:: 1999.237.4

Rights and Reproduction:: © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Not on view

In the middle of the Great Depression, "Fortune" magazine commissioned Walker Evans and staff writer James Agee to produce a feature on the plight of tenant farmers in the American South. The two New Yorkers spent several weeks documenting the harsh existence of three families who grew cotton on a dry hillside seventeen miles north of Greensboro, Alabama. The unpublished article eventually became one of the era's literary masterpieces, "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (1941). A journey to the limits of direct observation, the book presents in words and pictures "a portion of unimagined [human] existence," as Agee wrote in the preface.

This portrait of father and daughter, barefoot and at ease, is a superb example of the dignity and austere beauty Evans discovered in the lives of ordinary citizens during his half-century photographic career. With seeming transparency and characteristic graphic equipoise, Evans composed an image that is as much about family traditions as it is about broader agrarian issues. Strong and long-limbed like her father, Lucille Burroughs at age ten could pick 150 pounds of cotton a day. She also inherited a less useful legacy: her parents' lifelong debt to a landlord who owned their cabin, farm, tools, mules, and the product of all their labor.

Inscription: Signed and inscribed in pencil on mount, recto, bottom right: "Walker Evans"; bottom left: "Alabama, 1936"

Walker Evans; John T. Hill, Bethany, Connecticut

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Walker Evans," February 1, 2000–May 14, 2000.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "Walker Evans," June 2, 2000–September 12, 2000.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "Walker Evans," December 17, 2000–March 4, 2001.

Tate Modern. "Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph," June 5, 2003–September 7, 2003.

Museum Ludwig. "Cruel and Tender: The Real in the Twentieth Century Photograph," November 29, 2003–February 18, 2004.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag," June 6, 2006–September 4, 2006.

The Josef Albers Museum. "Walker Evans: Depth of Field," September 27, 2015–January 10, 2016.

Fonvielle, Lloyd. Walker Evans. Aperture Masters of Photography, Vol. 10. New York: Aperture, 1997. cover.

Keller, Judith. Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection. Malibu: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995. p. 166.

Hambourg, Maria Morris, Doug Eklund, Mia Fineman, and Jeff L. Rosenheim. Walker Evans. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000. no. 95, 91.

Dexter, Emma, and Thomas Weski, ed. Cruel and Tender: Photography and the Real. London: Tate Modern, 2003. p. 135.

Hill, John T., and Heinz Liesbrock, ed. Walker Evans: Depth of Field. Bottrop: The Josef Albers Museum, 2015. p. 97.

Essays
Early Documentary Photography
Kodak and the Rise of Amateur Photography
Walker Evans (1903–1975)

Timelines
The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present

"Recent Acquisitions, A Selection: 1999–2000": The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 58, no. 2 (Fall, 2000)
Walker Evans

Department

Photographs (35,820)

Artist / Maker / Culture

Walker Evans (9,700)

Object Type / Material

Gelatin silver prints (9,496)

Photographs (46,254)

Geographic Location

North and Central America (92,272)