Making of ‘Part of the Bedroom of Floyd Burroughs’ Cabin’ (by Walker Evans, 1936), 2015

The story behind the photograph…

In the summer of 1936, Fortune magazine sent photographer Walker Evans (1903–1975) and staff writer James Agee (1909–1955) to the American South to document the plight of impoverished tenant farmers living through the Great Depression. The two New Yorkers spent several weeks in the devastated cotton belt of Alabama, where they focused on three families, including the Burroughs. Evans, who had just finished some assignments as a Farm Security Administration photographer, aimed to produce dispassionate, objective, non-propagandist images. His gelatin silver prints included shots of sharecropper Floyd Burroughs’s sparsely furnished cabin (it has been suggested that Evans may have moved, rearranged or removed objects), as well as portraits of the family’s everyday life. The extensive finished article was never published, but it eventually became a book, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Though this sold poorly on its initial printing, interest was renewed in the 1960s and it is now regarded as one of the twentieth century’s great literary masterpieces.