Stables, Natchez, Mississippi
After dropping out of college in 1922, Evans took a job at the New York Public Library, then spent a year in Paris polishing his French and writing short stories and nonfiction essays. He returned to New York in 1927 intent on becoming a writer, but also took up the camera and gradually redirected his aesthetic impulses to bring the strategies of literature-lyricism, irony, incisive description, and narrative structure-into the medium of photography. His principal subject was the vernacular, the indigenous expressions of a people, found in roadside stands, cheap cafés, advertisements, and small-town main streets.
In this photograph made in Natchez, Mississippi, Evans focuses the viewer's attention on the collage of words and pictures left behind by a nineteenth-century sign painter. It was a strategy he learned from studying the photographs of Eugène Atget (seen to the left), about whose work Evans wrote in 1931: "His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not 'the poetry of the street' or 'the poetry of Paris,' but the projection of Atget's person."
In this photograph made in Natchez, Mississippi, Evans focuses the viewer's attention on the collage of words and pictures left behind by a nineteenth-century sign painter. It was a strategy he learned from studying the photographs of Eugène Atget (seen to the left), about whose work Evans wrote in 1931: "His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not 'the poetry of the street' or 'the poetry of Paris,' but the projection of Atget's person."
Artwork Details
- Title: Stables, Natchez, Mississippi
- Artist: Walker Evans (American, St. Louis, Missouri 1903–1975 New Haven, Connecticut)
- Date: March 1935
- Medium: Gelatin silver print
- Dimensions: 25.4 x 20.3 cm (10 x 8 in.)
- Classification: Photographs
- Credit Line: Gilman Collection, Purchase, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, 2005
- Object Number: 2005.100.553
- Rights and Reproduction: © Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- Curatorial Department: Photographs
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