[843 Postcards of Street Scenes Collected by Walker Evans]

The penny picture postcard came of age during the first decade of the twentieth century. Sold in five-and-dime stores in every small town in America, postcards satisfied the country's need for connection in the age of the railroad and Model T, when, for the first time, many Americans regularly found themselves traveling far from home. By 1914 the craze had become a boon to local photographers as their black-and-white photographs of small-town main streets, local hotels, and new public buildings were transformed into millions of handsomely colored photo-lithographic postcards.

These postcards belonged to the American photographer Walker Evans, who began collecting them when he was ten years old. By the end of his life, he had accumulated more than nine thousand postcards, which he methodically classified and organized into subject categories such as "Small Towns," "Summer Hotels," and "Railroad Stations." The vernacular subjects and the generic, "artless" quality of the postcards represented a powerful strain of indigenous American realism that directly influenced Evans's own work.