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."