Penny Picture Display, Savannah / Photographer's Window Display, Birmingham, Alabama / Studio Portraits, Birmingham, Alabama

The only reason this photograph has any value is, an instinct is touched in it. . . . It's uproariously funny, and very touching and very sad and very human. Documentary, very real, very complex. All these people had posed in front of the local studio camera, and I bring my camera, and they all pose again together for me. That's a fabulous fact.

Walker Evans was in the South a number of times during the 1930s. While in Savannah, he photographed this photo-studio shop front. Storefronts remained a consistent theme in Evans's work, but this image spoke to him in a particularly poignant way. Young women, servicemen, professionals, couples, children, sisters, and a father and his daughter fill the window, all tightly arranged. These were the subjects Evans sought: not celebrities in highly decorated studios but everyday people.