Walker EvansAmerican, 1903–1975Penny Picture Display, Savannah
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Penny Picture Display, Savannah” now? Collection: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.
Chicago, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the work
Walker Evans was remarkably adept at straddling the cultural divide between documentary photography and the museum. One of several photographers hired by the Farm Security Administration to document the Depression, Evans made some of his most famous images in the summer of 1936: pictures of impoverished families in Hale County, Alabama, later published in his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Just two years later, he was honored with a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which had only recently embraced photography as an art form. This image of the many portraits in a photographer’s studio—an homage to the workaday photographer and the faces of ordinary Americans—became, in the context of a museum exhibition, a statement about the art and meaning of photography.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
Details
- Accession number
- 1962.148
In the catalog
Sources
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Image: Art Institute of Chicago — CC0
In the life of Walker Evans
The whole lifeJune 1935
A miners' settlement and a staff post at the RA
In 1935 Evans spends two months on a fixed-term photographic campaign in West Virginia and Pennsylvania; in June he accepts a job from the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. He quickly parlays this temporary employment into a full-time position as an “information specialist” in the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) and from October 1935 on does photographic work for it, primarily in the Southern United States.
summer 1936
Hale County with James Agee, on assignment for Fortune
In the summer of 1936, while on leave from the FSA, Evans and the writer James Agee are sent by Fortune to Hale County, Alabama, for a story the magazine subsequently opts not to run.
1938
“Walker Evans: American Photographs” at MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds “Walker Evans: American Photographs”, the museum's first exhibition devoted to the work of a single photographer; the catalogue includes an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, whom Evans befriended in his early days in New York.
until 1938
The end of his FSA work
Evans continues to work for the Farm Security Administration until 1938.
1938–1939
Working with and mentoring Helen Levitt
In 1938 and 1939 Evans works with and mentors Helen Levitt.
1941
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is published
Evans's photographs and Agee's text detailing the duo's stay with three white tenant families in southern Alabama during the Great Depression are published as the groundbreaking book “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”. Its detailed account of three farming families paints a deeply moving portrait of rural poverty.
