Walker Evans 

(American, 1903–1975)

Tenant Farmer’s Wife, Alabama 1936, 1971

Gelatin silver print

Museum purchase with funds donated by the Lawrence B. and Elyse Benenson Charitarian Foundation

In July 1936, the American photographer Walker Evans took leave from his salaried position in the Historical Section of the Resettlement Administration to travel to Hale County in rural Alabama with his friend, Fortune writer James Agee, in order to report on the living conditions of impoverished “sharecropper” tenant farmers in the Deep South. Searching for a representative family around which to build their story, Evans and Agee chanced upon Frank Tengle, Bud Fields and Floyd Burroughs, relatives farming near to each other on Hobe’s Hill, fifteen or so miles north of the county seat of Greensboro. Consciously gravitating to the relative order and desperate dignity of the Burroughs’ home, Evans photographed family members, their sparsely furnished cabin, their neighbors and their neighbors’ homes, sometimes surreptitiously with his hand-held Leica, but, at other times, as here, more openly and formally, using his undisguisable, tripod-mounted, 8x10 Deardorff view camera. Among these posed and austerely composed images are, famously, four all but identical portraits of Burroughs’s wife, Allie Mae Burroughs, set squarely against the clapboard siding of the tenant farmer’s house. The differences are slight and hard to catch yet telling. In one image, later selected by Evans for his 1938 publication, American Photographs, Allie Mae seems to be at ease, barely suppressing a shy smile. But in another, perhaps tired by standing in the heat and glare of mid-day, she appears more quizzical and strained, resistant even, perhaps. This is the image that we have here, the trenchant portrait of Annie Mae that Evans would prefer to present in the portfolio that makes up Book One of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, published much later, in 1941, by which time the original Fortune commission had been long forgotten as the attention of a nation approaching war turned away again from the plight of the rural poor. 

–John Tagg, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Art History

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