Walker Evans had a reputation, if not a steady income, as a photographer when Roy Stryker hired him at the Resettlement Administration in October 1935. Evans had taken up photography in 1928, at the age of twenty-five. He lived, in his own words, "very shabbily" in New York City, where he began to experiment with the medium by photographing city street life and vernacular architecture and by making portraits of his artist and intellectual friends.¹ During the late 1920s and early 1930s, his paid projects included illustrating a book that exposed the evils of Cuba's Machado regime and photographing African sculpture for the Museum of Modern Art.²

Apartment building, 311 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006715-M5

In front of 310 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006715-M3

Moving possessions, 317 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006715-M2

Evans came to the Resettlement Administration after doing some part-time work at the Department of the Interior, and his ideas about the systematic documentation of American culture influenced Stryker during the early period of the Historical Section. In notes written in 1934 and 1935 concerning the creation of photographs by the federal government, Evans called for images that would be a "pure record not propaganda," and he composed a list of subjects that resembled Stryker's later shooting scripts. ³ During the eighteen months or so that he worked at the agency, he photographed in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Arkansas, and Tennessee, but his best-known work during the period was a series of photographs of Alabama sharecroppers produced for Fortune magazine during a leave of absence. The periodical published neither the photographs nor the text that James Agee wrote to counterpoint them, but the work finally appeared in the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.⁴ The many influential photographs Evans made during this period were described by the critic John Szarkowski in 1973 as "poetic uses of bare-faced facts, facts presented with such fastidious reserve that the quality of the picture seemed identical to that of the subject."⁵

Apartment buildings, 315 and 317 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006712-M5

345 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006712-M3

Political poster, 345 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006712-M1

Stryker admired Evans's photographs, but the two men did not always get along well. In part this reflected differences in personality, but it also reflected the conflict between Evans's ideal of creating a pure record and Stryker's concern with producing photographs useful to the agency and promoting political or social change. The two parted company during 1937 and Evans returned to New York, where he worked on his exhibit and book American Photographs, continued to prepare his contribution to Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and began to make a series of photographs in the city's subways.⁶

In spite of his high level of creative activity, Evans seems to have been in need of money. Letters he and Stryker exchanged during April, May, and June 1938 refer to Evans's failure to obtain a Guggenheim Fellowship and allude to a possible short-term assignment for the Farm Security Administration.⁷ These photographs taken in New York City probably represent the outcome of the matter, although nothing in the agency's files explains the selection of the subject, if Evans was paid, or whether he and Stryker were satisfied with the pictures.

Children on East Sixty-first Street, probably between First and Second avenues. LC-USF33-006714-M1

Tenants on East Sixty-first Street, probably between First and Second avenues. LC-USF33-006718-M4

Apartments for rent, 326 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006718-M3

Captions for the file prints state that the photographs were made during the summer of 1938 on Manhattan's East Sixty-first Street. Internal evidence supplies more details: four issues of the Daily Mirror in one photograph carry the date Tuesday, August 23; the position of the sun's shadows on the building facades shows that the film had been exposed within an hour or two that morning; and an examination of street signs and house numbers indicates that Evans stayed more or less in the single block between First and Second Avenues. The brevity of the visit, together with the lack of written information about the assignment and the choice of a site not very far from Evans's East Ninety-second Street apartment imply that he, rather than Stryker, chose the subject.

Newspapers for sale at a grocery, 324 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006719-M5

A tenant on East Sixty-first Street, probably between First and Second avenues. LC-USF33-006719-M3

Children on East Sixty-first Street, probably between First and Second avenues. LC-USF33-006717-M3

These pictures of the neighborhood's residents, streets, signs, and buildings display Evans's interest in ordinary people and his fondness for vernacular expression. From the twenties through the fifties Evans made candid photographs of people on the street, pictures akin to these images of residents on urban stoops and sidewalks. Referring in 1971 to some of his 1928 and 1929 photographs, Evans said, "I found I wanted to get a type in the street, a 'snapshot' of a fellow on the waterfront, or a stenographer at lunch.

Second Avenue and East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006719-M1

That was a good vein. I still mine that vein."⁸ Vernacular expression appears in the photographs in the form of advertisements and architecture. The pictures of notices, signs, and billboards in this series convey a sense of the passage of time: thirty-cent lunches and five-cents-per-pound peaches are things of the past, and we have long forgotten political candidate Jeremiah Mahoney. And the erosion Evans captured in the photograph of Mahoney's poster reminds us how ephemeral human endeavor is.

Patterns of masonry, windows, fire escapes, and shadows transform the photographs of apartment house facades into geometric abstractions. In the 1930s, Evans often rendered buildings--for example, the rural churches he photographed in the South--as two-dimensional studies in form and texture, but he typically portrayed the entire facade. These photographs of tenement fronts recall his experiments of the 1920s, in which foreshortening, sharp-angled compositions, the use of strong shadows, and the exclusion of the roof and sidewalk heightened the degree of abstraction. The entire take also contains photographs that look up and down the block; in these, whole buildings are seen in their architectural context and the block itself is presented as the setting for human activity.

Analysis of the negatives suggests that the photographer shot four rolls of film; the take is represented in the Library of Congress collection by fifty negatives. The files contain several strips of negatives from two of the rolls, but only fragments from the other two. Evans probably made a selection from the entire take and sent the chosen negative strips to Washington, D.C.⁹

Our twenty-picture selection presents what we believe to have been Evans's shooting sequence. Images of building facades and people on the stoops recur throughout the series,

Laundry, near the intersection of First Avenue and East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006716-M3

indicating Evans's interest in these two subjects and showing how he made multiple exposures in a quest for the most satisfactory photograph possible.¹⁰ Evans must have made two or three passes up and down the block, alternately photographing the apartment houses on the sunny side and the people in the shade. Note that the first and last images depict the same building, and the movement of the sun has shifted the shadows cast by the balconies. At the west end of the block Evans photographed the elevated railway tracks and street sign; at the east end of the block he made a number of views of the intersection of Sixty-first Street and First Avenue, including the perspective shot of the entire block presented here.

Census records, real estate guides, and fire insurance maps draw a profile of the neighborhood in the 1930s. Situated at the southern end of the city's Yorkville District, the block was predominantly Italian, although many Irish and Poles lived on nearby East Side streets. The population grew during the decade, with most families living in rented three- or four-room apartments or in "rooming and lodging" houses built before 1900. Most buildings provided shared toilets and tubs, and nearly all residents had electricity or gas for cooking and lighting. Rents ranged from ten to fifty dollars per month. Residents either rode public transportation (a tramway ran parallel to East Sixty-first Street and the EL traveled along Second Avenue) or walked; few owned automobiles. A Roman Catholic church--identified as Our Lady of Perpetual Help on a 1934 map--adjoined a parochial school facing East Sixty-second Street. Many small businesses served the neighborhood, and a few larger concerns like warehouses and a laundry that served a citywide clientele.¹¹

First Avenue and East Sixty-first street. LC-USF33-006717-M1

401 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006716-M2

Restaurant and bakery, 1113 and 1115 First Avenue. LC-USF33-006713-M2

Evans probably knew little about social and economic conditions on the block. In any case, he was inclined to argue that photographers did not need such knowledge. The act of photographing, he told Leslie Katz, is "all done instinctively, as far as I can see, not consciously." This is consistent with Evans's diffidence at the application of the label "documentary" to his photographs. "The term should be documentary style," he told Katz. "You see, a document has use, whereas art is really useless. Therefore art is never a document, although it can adopt that style."¹²

Children on East Sixty-first Street, probably between First and Second avenues. LC-USF33-006722-M1

Fruit vendor's wagon in front of the rectory, 323 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006721-M2

Apartments and stores, 309 and 311 East Sixty-first Street. LC-USF33-006720-M3