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

Details / Information for 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)
Culture
America
Medium
gelatin silver print
Measurements
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.)
Credit Line
Wishing Well Fund 1973.120
Copyright
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
This artwork is known to be under copyright.
Location
Not on view
Print

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.
Black-and-white photograph from the shoulders up of Allie Mae Burroughs, a woman with a light skin tone, dark hair pulled back and standing in front of the wood siding of a building. She wears a shirt with a repetitive, geometric flower pattern and tilts her head slightly to her right, pressing her lips tightly together in a faint smile.

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

1936, printed later

Walker Evans

(American, 1903–1975)
America

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