The Great Depression of the 1930’s produced one of the greatest bodies of documentary photography in American history. Names such as Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and, most notably, Walker Evans were among the many photographers who worked for President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era Farm Security Administration, known as the FSA. Their assignment – fan out across the nation and create a portrait of American life with all its miseries and hardships during the Depression. What they found, especially in the rural Deep South, were economic conditions that were already dire long before the stock market crashed in 1929.
New Orleans was of particular interest to Walker Evans, who worked for the FSA from 1935 to 1937. A short biography of Evans published by the Art Institute of Chicago described Evans as “one of the leading photographers in the history of American documentary photography.
This 1935 photograph “Sidewalk and Shopfront” taken in the 500 block of Bourbon Street was one of an extensive series of images Evans took during his two-month visit to New Orleans in February and March 1935. This glimpse at the “French Opera Barber Shop – Home of the Perfecto Hair Restorer” is a delightful hint at what life must have been like in the French Quarter during those bohemian years when it was no longer the center of Creole culture and on the cusp of becoming the city’s adult entertainment district.
In New Orleans, Evans quickly settled into the local art community. He lived in a rented apartment in the Pontalba Building on Jackson Square where he became close friends with Paul Ninas, regarded as the dean of modern art in New Orleans, and his wife and fellow artist Jane, whom Evans later married after the couple divorced. From his base in the city, he traveled about photographing other buildings in the French Quarter, ordinary street and levee scenes, decaying Greek Revival architecture, peoples’ faces and plantation houses along River Road. As the Art Institute of Chicago bio claimed, Evans’ “forays into the city’s French Quarter resulted in some of his most iconic images.”
Art historian and former director of the Ogden Museum of Southern Art Richard Gruber, agreed. In an article for the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities, he described Evans’ visits to Louisiana as “one of the most productive times in his career, when he created many notable photographs including those made in Hale County, Alabama, during the summer of 1936, in the company of writer James Agee, for their book, ‘Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.’”
In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a major exhibition and publication of his work titled, “Walker Evans: American Photographs.” The publication contained 87 photographs, including the one seen here and others taken during his two-month visit to New Orleans. In the book’s essay, New York writer and art connoisseur Lincoln Kirstein, who later served as one of World War II’s “Monuments Men,” claimed “the most characteristic single feature of Evans’ work is its purity, or even puritanism.”
Kirstein continued, “After looking at these pictures with all their clear, hideous and beautiful detail, their open insanity and pitiful grandeur, compare this vision of a continent as is, not as it might be or as it was, with any other coherent vision that we have since the war (World War I). What poet has said as much? What painter has shown as much?”
