Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama

1936, printed later
(American, 1903–1975)
Image: 23.7 x 18.4 cm (9 5/16 x 7 1/4 in.); Matted: 50.8 x 40.6 cm (20 x 16 in.)
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This artwork is known to be under copyright.
Location: not on view

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Description

Walker Evans worked for the government’s Farm Security Administration in the late 1930s. He prioritized his artistic vision over the agency’s prescribed aims, which often sent photographers on assignments with specific scripts and subjects to photograph. Evans’s provocative images confront the viewer with the realities of life at the time, from the defiant face of Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of an impoverished sharecropper and mother of four, to the juxtaposition of a graveyard and steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. US Camera was among several popular magazines featuring work from documentary photographers. Its aim was to highlight photographers’ creative eye.
Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama

Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama

1936, printed later

Walker Evans

(American, 1903–1975)
America, 20th century

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