Before
making his famous portraits of Southern tenant farmers for Roosevelt’s New Deal,
Walker Evans was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to document
selected works in a groundbreaking exhibition of 1935. The hundreds of photographs
that he took are both records of objects included in the show—the first to
present African sculptures as works of art—and early statements of his
photographic style. Evans balances sculpted figures and ceremonial masks in
tightly cropped frames, highlighting the formal elements that made such pieces
so appealing to Modernist artists. Evans’s introduction to that museum proved
fruitful for the young artist: it gave him its first-ever solo exhibition for a
photographer in 1938, Walker Evans:
American Photographs.