Skip to main content
Bessemer, Alabama
Bessemer, Alabama
Bessemer, Alabama

Bessemer, Alabama

Artist (American, 1903 - 1975)
Date1936 (printed 1971)
Mediumgelatin silver print
DimensionsImage: 7 3/8 × 9 1/8 in. (18.7 × 23.2 cm)
Support: 8 1/4 × 10 in. (21 × 25.4 cm)
Frame: 19 5/8 × 16 1/2 × 7/8 in. (49.8 × 41.9 × 2.2 cm)
ClassificationsPhotograph
Credit LineGift of the Ives Family in memory of Norman S. and Constance T. Ives, 2016
Object number2016.21.4
DescriptionUnpaved road at center of composition, flanked by small houses with peaked roofs and a line of utility poles at left and a fairly empty lot at right with a couple of structures. Along the background is a long row of tall industrial smokestacks and furnaces.
Text Entries
Walker Evans visited Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in 1935 and 1935 as a photographer for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Adminstration. Evans made some of his most enduring images of architecture and signage in and around Birmingham, Alabama, in the mid-1930s and also trained his camera on the structures and working conditions that were part of that region’s booming steel industry.

 

For other images Walker Evans made in the area around Birmingham, see “”Fish Market near Birmingham, Alabama” (2006.22.4) and “Boarding House Porch, Birmingham, Alabama” (2016.x.x) from this same portfolio and donor.

 

Bessemer is a city southwest of Birmingham, Alabama. By the 1920s, the region around Birmingham produced one-fourth of this country’s foundry iron and was the largest producer of steel in the Southeast. In 1886 iron and steel magnate Henry Fairfield DeBardeleben founded the City of Bessemer and the Bessemer Land and Improvement Company with the goal of creating a center for the steel industry. With $2 million in starting capital, he built several blast furnaces and the following year bought 4,000 acres of land, marking off blocks for a new town along the rail lines of the Alabama Great Southern Railway. Henry DeBardeleben believed that the town’s name should reflect an economy that was built on the iron ore and steel industry. He named the community “Bessemer” in honor of Sir Henry Bessemer who invented the open-hearth method of steel producing. In April of 1887 the first commercial lots were sold and the town of Bessemer began to grow. By the 1920s, Bessemer was the fourth largest city in Alabama. (source: City of Bessemer website http://www.bessemeral.org/history/, accessed February 2017).

 

After giving a lecture at Yale University in 1964, Evans began teaching there the following year as a professor of graphic design. He found a dynamic group of colleagues including Herbert Matter and Norman Seaton Ives. Ives worked with Evans to create a portfolio of his photographs issued in 1971, of which this photograph was a part (see object file for detailed publishing information and list of photographs included, all shot in the 1930s.
Walker Evans visited Louisiana and the Gulf Coast in 1935 and 1935 as a photographer for the U.S. government’s Farm Security Adminstration. Evans made some of his most enduring images of architecture and signage in and around Birmingham, Alabama, in the mid-1930s and also trained his camera on the structures and working conditions that were part of that region’s booming steel industry.
On View
Not on view
Bessemer, Alabama
Walker Evans
1936 (printed 1971)
Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania
Walker Evans
1935 (printed 1971)
Boarding House Porch, Birmingham, Alabama
Walker Evans
1936 (printed 1971)
Boarding House Porch, Birmingham, Alabama
Walker Evans
1936 (printed 1971)
Polluting the Grand Canyon
Wanda Hammerbeck
1990
Untitled (Plak Shak)
Walker Evans
1974
Untitled (Green Building Detail)
Walker Evans
May 30, 1974
Untitled (Green building)
Walker Evans
May 30, 1974
Sacred Power Pole
Larry McNeil
Created 2008, printed 2022