[Billboard, Birmingham, Alabama]

1936

Not on view

Evans was one of the first photographers to document the roadside as a site for the radical transformation of American culture. For Evans, the billboard, with its movie-screen scope and alluring, surreal juxtapositions, was the quintessential expression of the emerging media culture. In his deceptively straightforward picture, the artist creates a new ironic reading for the billboard. This hand-painted version of the American dream home, with its bizarre disjunctions in scale, skewed perspective, and mannequin-like figures, seems to have communicated in spite of itself how strange and unreal the promise of luxury and comfort must have seemed to the rural poor victimized by the Depression.

Artwork Details

Title: [Billboard, Birmingham, Alabama]
Artist: Walker Evans (American, St. Louis, Missouri 1903–1975 New Haven, Connecticut)
Date: 1936
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image: 7 1/2 × 9 7/16 in. (19.1 × 24 cm)
Sheet: 7 1/2 × 9 7/16 in. (19.1 × 24 cm)
Classification: Photographs
Credit Line: Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 1990
Object Number: 1990.1169
Rights and Reproduction: © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Curatorial Department: Photographs

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[Roadside Furniture Store Sign Near Birmingham, Alabama], Walker Evans American, Film negative — [Roadside Furniture Store Sign Near Birmingham, Alabama]
Walker Evans
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