American documentary photographer Walker Evans is best known for his work with the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression in the United States. Capturing the everyday experiences of his subjects, Evans photographed couples at Coney Island, people eating lunch, subway passengers, and portraits of tenant farmers, among many others. His artistic interests began as a child with painting, collecting postcards, and photographing friends and family. His art evolved into an evocative style of realism that combined the ordinary with the poetic, as evidenced in his portrait Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama, 1936/1971, an iconic image of the Great Depression and in Glenstone’s collection.

–Naseer Haynes Alvarez, from the Glenstone Field Guide