Walker Evans
Roadside Store, between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, Alabama

Public Domain

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Artist Walker Evans American, 1903–1975

CultureAmerican

Titles

Roadside Store, between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, Alabama

Date1936, printed later

PlaceGreensboro (near), Alabama, United States

PlaceTuscaloosa (near), Alabama, United States

MediumGelatin silver print

DimensionsImage: 7 5/8 × 9 9/16 in. (19.3 × 24.3 cm)
Sheet: 8 × 9 15/16 in. (20.3 × 25.2 cm)
Mount: 11 1/2 × 13 in. (29.2 × 33 cm)

Credit LineThe Manfred Heiting Collection, funded by the Susan Vaughan Foundation and others in memory of Morgan Garwood

Object number2002.1025

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Manfred Heiting Collection of Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionWalker Evans’s images of poor tenant farmers and weather-beaten rural architecture in Hale County, Alabama, photographed in the summer of 1936 are, for many Americans, quintessential images of the Depression era. Evans traveled through the South that summer with James Agee who had been commissioned to write an article for Fortune magazine—a collaborative venture that finally made it to the printed page five years later in book form as the American classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Evans’s documentary style, in which his humble subjects—whether human or architectural—spoke powerfully of a difficult but dignified life, have become a model for subsequent generations of photographers.
ProvenanceArtist estate, Lunn Gallery, Washington.

Bought by Manfred Heiting from Galerie Rudolf Kicken GmbH, 4/26/1977.
Exhibition History"American Vision: Photographers from the East, Selections from the Manfred Heiting Collection purchased by the Brown Foundation for the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston from August 23-December 29, 2003.

“A Critical Eye: Mid-Century American Photographs from the Morgan Garwood Collection,” The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, July 23–November 2, 2014.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

in pencil, recto of mount, lower left, and circled in pencil: "56".
in pencil, recto of mount, lower center: "7 5/8"
in pencil, recto of mount, lower right: "Roadside Store between Tuscaloosa and Greensboro, / Alabama, 1936"
recto of mount cropping marks in pencil
verso of mount top right in pencil "70.1339"

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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