In his 1938 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art titled American Photographs, Walker Evans presented a variant image of the current lot, which showed a slightly smiling Allie Mae Burroughs. However, in the classic 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, in which his thirty-one images were presented consecutively, without captions, and preceding the text by James Agee, Evans chose the more haunting variant, shown in the current lot. In it, viewers meet an expression that is decidedly more grave and somber. The book covered the lives of three sharecropper families in the South during the Great Depression, and perhaps for solely focusing on the turmoils of the decade, Evans chose this variant. It is this portrait that Lionel Trilling, in his 1942 review of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, announced as “one of the finest objectsof any art of our time…with all her misery and perhaps with a touch of pity for herself, [she] simply refused to be an object of your ‘social consciousness.’ She refuses to be an object at
all. Everything in the picture proclaims her to be all subject.” Along with the portrait of her husband, Floyd Burroughs (lot 229), the portrait of Allie Mae has come to sensibly articulate the plight of an entire era.