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Dimensions: measurements note 5 3/8 by 3 3/8 in. (13.7 by 8.6 cm.)
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Provenance: The Estate of Walker Evans Acquired by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, from the above, 1984Acquired by Sander Gallery, New York, from the above, 1984Private Collectors, ChicagoSotheby's New York, Photographs Between the World Wars, 26 April 1989, Sale 5839, Lot 211 Acquired by the present owner from the above
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Literature: Other prints of this image:John T. Hill, Walker Evans at Work (New York, 1982), p. 18Jeff L. Rosenheim, Maria Morris Hambourg, Douglas Eklund, and Mia Fineman, Walker Evans (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 1
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Notes: This silhouette self-portrait is from a small group of similar studies done by Evans during his expatriate sojourn in France in the 1920s. The 23-year-old Evans had traveled to Paris in 1926 to pursue his goal of becoming a writer, taking along with him a new folding 'vest-pocket' camera. He faltered in his efforts to enter into the cultural life of Paris; and although his literary ambitions were never fully realized, it was during his time in France that Evans did his first serious work with a camera. Antibes is one of several similar photographs Evans made of his shadow on a wall in the French resort town of Juan-les-Pins, in the commune of Antibes, where he traveled in the spring of 1927 (cf. Walker Evans at Work, p. 18) . Evans authority Jeff Rosenheim locates two other early prints of the image offered here. One of these, a small contact print, was included in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's retrospective exhibition, Walker Evans, in 2000. Maria Morris Hambourg has noted that Evans's self-portraits from this period are consonant with the young photographer's isolation from the many expatriates who also made their home in France in the 1920s. She writes, 'as often as not Evans's subject was himself: his lodgings, his ghostly presence at the window of this Paris boardinghouse, his shadow thrown on the wall by the low winter sun in Juan-les-Pins. Rarely exploring the world with his camera, he used it instead as a witness, as if to prove that his solitary year abroad, so important intellectually, had actually had a physical dimension' (Walker Evans, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000, pp. 12-13).
