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Description: Walker Evans
(1903-1975)
'PENNY PICTURE DISPLAY, SAVANNAH'
mounted, a Museum of Modern Art label on the reverse, matted, 1936
7 by 6 3/4 in. 17.8 by 17.2 cm.
Provenance
Purchased from the photographer, 1963
Exhibited
Walker Evans: American Photographs, June 1962 - February 1963
The Photographer's Eye, May - August 1964
Public Landscapes, September - December 1974
Photography collection galleries installation, December 1979
Literature
American Photographs, Part One,
pl. 2
Szarkowski, Looking at Photographs, p. 117
First and Last, p. 127
Photographs for the F.S.A. 229
Walker Evans at Work, p. 239
Rosenheim, Walker Evans, pl. 66
Keller 517
Mora and Hill, The Hungry Eye, p. 135
(all variant croppings)
This print of Evans's famous Penny Picture Display was included in a 1962 Museum exhibition of eighteen photographs from the American Photographs series. By 1962, the book American Photographs had been out of print for twenty years, and a revised edition of the volume was prepared, overseen by Museum Director of Publications Monroe Wheeler. To accompany this new edition, Wheeler also organized a 'compact' exhibition of eighteen American Photographs images, including the print offered here, as well as the Girl in Fulton Street and Houses in Negro Quarter of Tupelo, Lots 47 and 48 in the present sale.
The print of Penny Picture Display and Lots 47 and 48, all from the photographer's personal collection, were purchased from him in 1963, at the close of the Museum show. John Szarkowski had just joined the staff of the Museum in 1962, but he had met Walker Evans some years before. In 1954, the young Szarkowski had won a Guggenheim grant to photograph Louis Sullivan's architecture, and Evans had been a referee in that competition. Szarkowski would go on to mount a major retrospective of Evans's work in 1971.
This print of Penny Picture Display is one of two early prints of the image owned by the Museum. The other was donated to the Museum by photographer Willard Van Dyke (cf. Lot 44). Early prints of Penny Picture Display, on warm paper, mounted, are scarce; more frequently seen-although still uncommon-are prints of the image developed by the Farm Security Administration labs, on single-weight, ferrotyped paper.
Like much of Evans's work, Penny Picture Display at first glance appears to be a simple, 'found' image, but the story of its making is more complex. Walker Evans scholar Jeff Rosenheim has pointed out that the Savannah studio was, in fact, a dance studio, and the window was also lettered with the proprietor's name. A portion of the dancers' space had been rented out to an itinerant photographer, and it is this slice of window that Evans chooses for his picture, focusing only on the word STUDIO and the myriad faces behind it (Rosenheim, p. 84).
Penny Picture Display is the second plate reproduced in Part One of American Photographs. In his afterword to the original 1938 edition, Lincoln Kirstein describes Part One of the volume as follows, and his words are as apt for this important Evans picture, as for the whole: "In the first part, which might be labeled 'People by Photography,' we have an aspect of America for which it would be difficult to claim too much. The photographs are arranged to be seen in their given sequence. They demand and should receive the slight flattery of your closest attention. They are not entirely easy to look at. They repel an easy glance. They are so full of facts they have to be inspected with more care than quickness. The physiognomy of a nation is laid on your table."