“For how many of us...has our imagination of what the United States looked like in the 1930s been determined not by a novel or a play or a poem or a painting or even by our own memories, but the work of a single photographer, Walker Evans?”

- Hilton Kramer, 1971 

 

WALKER EVANS' PHOTOGRAPHS ARE EVER-PRESENT. For many, they represent a collective remembrance of what Depression-era America looked like, particularly the South. Personally, Evans’ iconic photographs of sharecroppers have always determined how I imagine my own family’s origins as farmers and sharecroppers. I have never been able to rely solely on my grandmother’s recollections of the time: working the land as a sharecropper’s daughter. Since discovering Evans’ photographs in a high school journalism class, I have used Evans’ images to visually stand-in for a portion of my family’s history, particularly the places and people for whom I have little or no visual trace. I conjure Evans’ photographs, like his famous portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs, and blend his images of Hale County, Alabama with my own life in Saline County, Arkansas. This series is both an homage to my family’s sharecropping past while also a partial fabrication as I can never truly separate Evans’ America from my own family history. The prints in this series depict this surreal merging of iconic imagery and personal history, which I created using a combination of historic and digital photographic processes. Each print in the series is a salted paper print, a 19th century medium created with gelatin, silver, and salt. Each photograph is toned with gold and platinum and washed in water from the Saline River.