Silverware

Walker Evans is best known for his images of the Depression-era South, made with a precise, large-format camera. His art reflected a new kind of aesthetic neutrality: his vision was at once objective and personal, intense and unsentimental. Characteristically, this image-though devoid of people-powerfully evokes a sense of dignified human presence in the spare, ordered space of a tenant farmer's kitchen. Evans made this photograph while on assignment with writer James Agee to investigate the plight of Southern tenant farmers in rural Alabama-a project that culminated in their book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).