Walker Evans - Photographs New York Friday, April 5, 2024 | Phillips

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  • “The photographic eye of Walker Evans represents much that is best in photography’s past and in its American present. . . He is giving us the contemporary civilization of eastern America as Atget gave us Paris before the war and as Brady gave us the War between the States.”
    —Lincoln Kirstein, 1938
    Walker Evans’s study of a cluster of humble structures in Tupelo, Mississippi, encapsulates the photographer’s astute visual aesthetic and his ability to create photographs that transcend their quotidian subject matter to speak about the American experience. Evans included this image in his first monograph, American Photographs, in 1938, and it was featured in exhibitions of the photographer’s work at The Museum of Modern Art on multiple occasions.  

     

    In February of 1936, Walker Evans was working in the American South under the auspices of the Resettlement Administration, documenting the RA’s projects as well as the continued need for the administration’s assistance. Evans’s relationship with Roy Stryker, his direct superior at the RA, was a tense one; Evans had a tendency to gravitate toward subjects that appealed to his own complex artistic agenda and bristled at being directed to produce what he felt was mere propaganda for a government agency. Although Stryker had appointed Evans Senior Information Specialist, he was growing tired of Evans’s relentlessly self-driven approach and sent the photographer a detailed itinerary and a very specific shooting script for his continued travel through the South.   

     

    In Tupelo, Mississippi, Stryker directed Evans to produce ‘a set of pictures showing the present state of buildings, and some additional local color.’ It is unknown if the houses in the present photograph were the ones Styker requested to be shot, but they unquestionably fit in with Evans’s personal proclivities. Evans had long been drawn to American architecture as subject matter for his camera and was especially interested in examples of vernacular architecture, such as these houses in what was described at the time as the Negro Quarter of Tupelo. The resulting image is a uniquely American image, seen by this quintessentially American photographer.  

     


     

    Read more about the collection

    • Provenance

      PB 84, New York, 7 June 1978, lot 396
      Collection of Paul Walter, New York
      Sotheby's, New York, 3 October 2001, lot 127
      Private Collection
      Christie's, New York, 3 April 2014, lot 265

    • Literature

      Walker Evans: American Photographs, Part I, pl. 21
      Maddox, Walker Evans Photographs for the Farm Security Administration, 1935-1938, pl. 125
      Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection, pl. 476

FIGURE + FORM: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

323

Tupelo, Mississippi

1935
Gelatin silver print.
7 x 9 1/4 in. (17.8 x 23.5 cm)
Signed, titled, and dated in pencil on the verso.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$25,000 - 35,000 

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Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com
 

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 5 April 2024