Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner

One Work

by Olivier Richon

An examination of one of Walker Evans's iconic photographs of the Great Depression. Kitchen Corner, Tenant Farmhouse, Hale County, Alabama shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of an Alabama sharecropper. Taken in 1936 by Walker Evans as part of his work for the Farm Security Administration, Kitchen Corner was not published until 1960, when it was included in a new edition of Walker Evans and James Agee's classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 1960 reissue of Evans and Agee's book had an enormous impact on Americans' perceptions of the Depression, creating a memory-image retrospectively through Walker's iconic photographs and Agee's text. In this latest addition to the Afterall One Work series, photographer Olivier Richon examines Kitchen Corner . The photograph is particularly significant, he argues, because it uses a documentary form that privileges detachment, calling attention to overlooked objects and to the architecture of the dispossessed. Given today's growing economic inequality, the photograph feels pointedly relevant. The FSA, established in 1935, commissioned photographers to document the impact of the Great Depression in America and used the photographs to advertise aid relief. For four weeks in the summer of 1936, Evans collaborated with Agee on an article about cotton farmers in the American South. The result of that project was the landmark publication Let Us Now Praise Famous Men , documenting three sharecropper families and their environment. These photographs were intimate, respectful portraits of the farmers, and of their homes, furniture, clothing, and rented land. Kitchen Corner powerfully evokes Agee's observations of the significance of “bareness and space” in these “general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another... [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have.”

88 pages, Paperback

Published June 18, 2019

Reviews

[Aubrey J · Rating 4 out of 5]

if you want to know a whole lot about Walker Evans’ photograph entitled “Kitchen Corner,” then boy do I have the book for you

[Jon Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The idea behind this series is brilliant. In a world where we see most images for less than one second before we heart them and move on, there is nothing better than to live with a single photograph for the span of a short book.

At some points, I think the author goes a little bit too far, making connections that seemed a little doubtful to me. But, overall, the book made me see things in the photograph I had not seen before, and it helped me appreciate it much more deeply then before.

[Patrick Hanlon · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting interpretation of the composition, impact and aesthetic questions that stem from the Walker Evans photograph from his collaboration with James Agee on Let Us Now Praise Great Men. There are times when the interpretation may attribute more intention and meaning to the image than Evans may have intended but toward the end of the book there are observations about the image and its significance that to acknowledge Evans' and the image's place in photography.