[Contact Sheet (120 format): Palmist Building Exterior; Walker Evans Standing Outside Palmist Building, Using Polaroid SX-70 Camera]
Gay Burke American
Person in photograph Walker Evans American
Not on view
In 1973, Gay Burke was hired to teach photography at the University of Alabama where she led the program for 42 years and became known as “the mother of Alabama Art photography.” Concurrent with the start of Burke’s tenure at Alabama, in the fall of 1973 Walker Evans began to use the SX-70 Polaroid camera exclusively. Evans soon travelled to Alabama to revisit some of the sites and themes he had photographed decades before. There, with William Christenberry (an Alabama art department alumnus who was then teaching at the Corcoran School of Art and Design), the trio of photographers set out on a tour of Alabama. Burke presciently trained her camera on Evans.