Walker EvansAmerican, 1903–1975Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans” 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 is widely recognized as a key figure in documentary photography. His simple yet poignant photographs of the American vernacular—including hand-painted signs, quiet domestic interiors, and small-town street scenes—came together in his landmark 1938 exhibition and publication, American Photographs. Evans created nearly two-thirds of the images in the book during his travels through the South, beginning with a two-month visit to New Orleans in early 1935. A New York businessman had hired Evans to produce a book of photographs on the decaying neoclassical architecture of riverfront plantation houses. Although the project was never realized, Evans’s forays into the city’s French Quarter resulted in some of his most iconic images. This photograph of a Bourbon Street barbershop’s exterior, covered with mismatched stripes, is slightly cropped in the book; this particular print presents a fuller view of the scene to the top, right, and bottom.
Art Institute of ChicagoCC BY 4.0
Details
- Accession number
- 1991.1232
In the catalog
Sources
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Image: Art Institute of Chicago — © the artist or rights holder
In the life of Walker Evans
The whole lifeMay – June 1933
An assignment in Cuba
In May and June 1933 Evans takes photographs in Cuba on assignment for Lippincott, the publisher of Carleton Beals' “The Crime of Cuba”, a “strident account” of the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado. He documents street life, the presence of police, beggars and dockworkers in rags, and other waterfront scenes; 31 of his photographs will appear in Beals' book.
May – June 1933
Drinking with Hemingway in Cuba
In Cuba Evans drinks nightly with Ernest Hemingway, who lends him money to extend his two-week stay by an additional week. Fearing that his photographs might be deemed critical of the government and confiscated, he leaves 46 prints with Hemingway, and helps him acquire photos from newspaper archives documenting the political violence Hemingway describes in “To Have and Have Not” (1937).
June 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.
