LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART I  / 

15

WALKER EVANS (American, 1903-1975) TRAFFIC, NYC inscription on verso in pencil

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WALKER EVANS (American, 1903-1975) TRAFFIC, NYC inscription on verso in pencil
WALKER EVANS (American, 1903-1975) TRAFFIC, NYC inscription on verso in pencil "XIV, Manhattan c. 1928, used in 'Walker Evans: First and Last', 3, also Hound and Horn, Vol IV #1, between pp. 42-3, Oct-Dec 1930" vintage gelatin silver print 5 1/16 x 7 15/16 in. (12.9 x 20.2 cm) 1928-1929 PROVENANCE Private Collection (until 1982) Private Collection, NORTH AMERICA LITERATURE Walker Evans, "New York City," HOUND & HORN, vol. IV, no. 1, (October-December 1930), pp. 42-43 (illustrated) WALKER EVANS: FIRST AND LAST, New York, 1978, p. 3 (illustrated) WALKER EVANS AT WORK, New York, 1982, p. 29 (illustrated and variant illustrated) Lloyd Fonvielle, WALKER EVANS: APERTURE MASTERS OF PHOTOGRAPHY, NUMBER 10, New York, 1993, p. 13 (illustrated) Maria Morris Hambourg, et al, WALKER EVANS, New York, 2000, p. 145, pl. 3 (illustrated) Jeff L. Rosenheim, ed., unCLASSIFIED: A WALKER EVANS ANTHOLOGY, New York, 2000, p. 177, no. 27 (illustrated) In 1928, Walker Evans lived in Brooklyn Heights. He worked on Wall Street at night and wandered the city during the day making photographs with a 21/4 x 41/4 inch hand camera. He would often finish a roll of film without leaving his own neighborhood. He once said he felt himself mad with the possibilities of photography. This photograph was made from a couple of stories above street level near Borough Hall in Brooklyn, only a few blocks from his home, as recent scholarship has proven. Previously it was thought to be somewhere in Manhattan. In this period, Evans was seeking his own style. A strategy common at the time and borrowed from European "New Vision" photography was to look down from above in order to emphasize the geometric arrangement in a photograph. This is one of at least two exposures of the same motif. In this exposure, Evans has captured a man just as he is placing a hat on his head. This was one of the first four Evans photographs to be published by his friend Lincoln Kirstein in HOUND & HORN in 1930.
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