Boarding House Porch, Birmingham, Alabama
Support: 8 3/8 × 10 in. (21.3 × 25.4 cm)
Mat: 17 5/8 × 14 5/8 in. (44.8 × 37.1 cm)
Frame: 19 1/2 × 16 1/2 × 3/4 in. (49.5 × 41.9 × 1.9 cm)
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 “Bessemer, Alabama” (2016.x.x) from this same portfolio and donor.
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.