A Child's Grave, Hale County, Alabama

Walker Evans perfected a dispassionate documentary approach to photography that was concise yet often poetic. Among his best known pictures are those he made on a 1936 trip to Hale County, Alabama, with writer James Agee, to record the lives of three impoverished tenant farmer families during the Depression. Evans’s photographs and Agee’s lengthy text were eventually published as the 1941 book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee devoted a short chapter to a local graveyard, noting the improvised nature of markers on the poorest of the burial sites, including pine boards, glasses, and old crockery. Evans photographed several such graves (a different image than this was included in the book); in this picture, he dramatically cropped the print from a full negative in order to echo the horizontal shape of the grave itself, underscoring with little flourish the poignant nature of his subject.