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Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Chicago

Walker Evans American
1946
Not on view
Walker Evans is known primarily for his photographs of the American South during the Great Depression and for his collaboration with the writer James Agee on their groundbreaking book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). During World War II and in the following decades, Evans worked for Fortune, the deluxe business magazine still in print today. To create this 1946 photograph, Evans returned to his childhood home and placed himself in the middle of a busy crosswalk at lunchtime. He focused on a pair of pedestrians in blinding sunlight, crossing past Chicago’s famous department store Marshall Field’s. With its intense, lower-than-eye-level gaze, the photograph recalls the artist’s maxim: "Stare. Die knowing something. You are not here long."

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Corner of State and Randolph Streets, Chicago
  • Artist: Walker Evans (American, St. Louis, Missouri 1903–1975 New Haven, Connecticut)
  • Date: 1946
  • Medium: Gelatin silver print
  • Dimensions: 15.9 x 13.1 cm (6 1/4 x 5 3/16 in.)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990
  • Object Number: 1990.1045
  • Rights and Reproduction: © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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