Walker Evans’ Greensboro

May 24, 2011 • 10:46 am • POSTED BY jtondera

Over the last couple years, I’ve been really interested in studying the role of typography within photography — looking at how different people capture type within an image. Walker Evans, widely considered the originator of the documentary tradition in American photography (with many thanks owed to his appreciation and collection of the picture postcard), is a photographer I’ve often looked to during this research. Much of Evans’ work captures the American street signage vernacular of the 1930s and 1940s.

Last week, I was going through the snapshots I took during my visit to Greensboro, Alabama and was thrilled to make this connection to Walker Evans — that Greensboro is indeed one of the towns that Evans documented for much of his acclaimed collaboration with writer James Agee in 1936. Their collaboration resulted in the honest and revealing book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and grew out of an assignment that the two accepted from Fortune magazine to produce a magazine feature on the conditions among white sharecropper families in the South.

WALKER EVANS: “Storefront, Greensboro, Alabama.” Summer 1936.

WALKER EVANS: “County seat of Hale County, Alabama.” 1935/1936.

Above: Greensboro’s Main Street, then and now. Much of the architecture remains unchanged.

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In the spirit of Evans, below is some of the inspiring signage I encountered while exploring Greensboro last week — a graphic designer’s gold mine! Fun fact: Evans went on to teach graphic design (and photography) at the Yale University School of Art from 1964 to 1974.)