Tenant farmer's wife, Hale County, Alabama
Sheet: 9 15/16 × 8 inches (25.24 × 20.32 cm)
- L10
20th-Century Photographs from the Hallmark Photographic Collection. Sioux City Art Center, Sioux City, IA, January 10 –February 22, 1981, no cat.
Masters of 20th-Century Photography from the Hallmark Collection. Waterloo Municipal Galleries, Waterloo, IA, May 2 -June 13, 1982, no cat.
20th-Century Works from the Hallmark Photographic Collection. Cottey College, Nevada, MO, January 9 – 27, 1984, no cat.
Faces: an Exhibition from the Hallmark Photographic Collection. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, September 16 - October 21, 1984, no. 12.
Rotation 6. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, July 13 – December 7, 2009, no cat.
Dignity vs. Despair: Dorothea Lange and the Depression Era Photographers, 1933-1941, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, June 23 – November 26, 2017, no cat.
Walker Evans took this photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs, the wife of a cotton sharecropper, in Hale County, Alabama. During the summer of 1936, he visited the southern United States alongside writer James Agee and photographed the lives of tenant farmers. This collaboration resulted in the 1941 publication of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book that conveys the stories of these impoverished farmers and their families.
On the surface, Evans’s work reflects people and their environments, but his photographs also encapsulate the intangible emotions of his subjects. He excelled at recording the unique characteristics of time and place in his images.
Purchased from E.G. Gallery by Hallmark Cards, Inc., Kansas City, MO, 1974;
Given by Hallmark Cards, Inc. to The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2005.
