Walker Evans. House in New Orleans. 1935. Gelatin silver print, 3 5/16 x 5 5/16″ (8.5 x 13.5 cm). Anonymous Fund. Evans gave this print to MoMA in the spring of 1938, and the cropping matches the one in the original exhibition.
In 1938, 75 years ago this fall, MoMA installed its first one-person photography show, comprising 100 prints by Walker Evans, with the self-consciously ambiguous title American Photographs. (After all, what exactly makes a photograph American?)
American Photographs cover image
Walker Evans’s <a href="http://www.momastore.org/museum/moma/ProductDisplay_Walker%20Evans:%20American%20Photographs,%20Seventy-Fifth%20Anniversary%20Edition_10451_10001_139043_-1_26683_11486_139049" target=_blank>American Photographs</a> is a touchstone for modern photography—a remarkable collection of photographs that shows a “poetics of editing and sequencing,” according to MoMA’s former Chief Curator of Photography Peter Galassi, that “helped to establish the photographer’s book as an indivisible unit of artistic expression.”
Like many of the works in New Photography 2009, Sara VanDerBeek’s photographs are made entirely in the studio. She collects pictures from various sources, including art history books, archives, magazines, and newspapers, and incorporates them into sculptures that are made only to be photographed. After Sara photographs her sculptures, they are immediately dismantled, and her picture is the only remaining evidence of the temporary structure.
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