In the winter of 1938, at the height of his acclaim, Walker Evans began a three-year project to photograph riders on the New York subway. Wearing a hidden camera with a cable release running down his sleeve, Evans photographed without a viewfinder, the lens of his camera peaking out between his coat buttons. Evans’s great contribution to American Modernism was his insistence on eliminating all self-aggrandizing artistry from his pictures in order to present only that which was in front of him: the thing itself. His subway portraits, as seen in Lots 22 and 23, in which both the framing and the subjects’ “poses” contained a great element of chance, represent Evans’ culminating rejection of the high-art tradition of Alfred Stieglitz, whom he once referred to as ''a screaming aesthete.''