Around 1930, Walker Evans met Lincoln Kirstein, founder of Hound & Horn, a sophisticated review of arts and letters, and co-organizer in 1929 of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, the precursor to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. When Kirstein saw this and other photographs, he wrote to A. Hyatt Mayor (later Curator of Prints at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) that "Evans has done some magnificent photographs of circus posters on barns and drug stores, ripped by the wind and rain, so that they look like some horrible accident."

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