The Cleveland Museum of Art

Collection Online as of December 18, 2025

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
gelatin silver print
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.)
Wishing Well Fund 1973.120
© Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Location: Not on view

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.
  • "The Year in Review for 1973." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 61, no. 2 (1974): 31-78. p. 77, no. 143 25152513
    The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978. Reproduced: p. 259 archive.org
    Cleveland Museum of Art, Tom E Hinson. Catalogue of Photography. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1996. Reproduced: P. 149
  • Photographs in Ink. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 20, 2022-April 2, 2023).
    From Riches to Rags: American Photography in the Depression. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (August 13-December 31, 2017).
    Portraiture: The Image of the Individual. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (November 22, 1983-January 22, 1984).
    Year in Review: 1973. The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (January 30-March 17, 1974).
  • {{cite web|title=Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama|url=false|author=Walker Evans|year=1936, printed later|access-date=18 December 2025|publisher=Cleveland Museum of Art}}

Source URL:

https://www.clevelandart.org/art/1973.120