Joe’s Auto Graveyard, Pennsylvania
Support: 17 1/2 × 14 3/8 in. (44.5 × 36.5 cm)
Frame: 19 1/2 × 16 3/8 × 3/4 in. (49.5 × 41.6 × 1.9 cm)
Text Entries
Walker Evans made a series of photographs in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and its envirions in 1935, largely focusing on the steel industry and worker housing and producing iconic images including “American Legionnarie,” “Window Display, Bethlehem,” and especially “Graveyard, Houses, and Steel Mill, Bethlehem.” He also photographed in the nearby steel town of Easton. “Joe’s Auto Graveyard” appears to have been located between the two towns and is sometimes listed as being “near Bethlehem” or in the “vicininity of Easton.” In the list of plates for the portfolio of which this print is a part it is listed as “’Joe’s Auto Graveyars,’ near Bethlehem, Pa.” with a date of 1936. Several variant images and/or croppings of this image exist, one showing railroad tracks in the foreground.
For other images Walker Evans took in steel towns, see “Bessemer, Alabama” and “Boarding House Porch, Birmingham, Alabama, both 1936, from the same portfolio and donated by the same donor (2016.x.x)
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).