Walker Evans

Like many American artists of his generation, Walker Evans made the pilgrimage to Paris, in his case, shortly after dropping out of college in the mid-1920s. When he returned to New York in 1927, Evans all but abandoned his earlier ambition of becoming a writer and instead began photographing his newly adopted city. Over the course of the next decade, he would become one of the most well-known photographers in the United States, establishing a documentary style within a fine arts practice.

Around 1929, Evans became acquainted with Lincoln Kirstein, a brilliant Harvard undergraduate who had already founded the esteemed literary journal Hound & Horn and the pioneering Harvard Society for Contemporary Art—Evans’s early work would be included in both venues. In 1931 Kirstein commissioned the photographer to document decaying nineteenth-century houses in the Northeast. During a break, Evans spent the month of September in Provincetown and Martha’s Vineyard, where he made a series of photographs of weather-beaten posters that Kirstein described as “ripped by the wind and rain, so that they look like some horrible accident.” The resulting images, including Torn Movie Poster, combine Evans’s emerging interests in the American vernacular and Surrealism. By recording the poster head-on and cropping out the surrounding context, Evans ably conflates the surface of the photograph with that of the poster itself and exploits the photographic image’s inherent status as a fragment. The couple’s terrified faces as they look out at the unidentified menace, along with the torn shreds over the woman’s forehead, perfectly allegorize the economic ruin and anxiety of the Great Depression.