Penny Picture Display, Savannah, Georgia

In this photograph, Walker Evans turned his lens on the commercial nature of photography. As the title states, it would only cost a penny to have a portrait taken and printed in Savannah, Georgia, in 1936. By contrast, to have a daguerreotype taken (you can see an example of this type of photograph in the nearby antique case) would cost anywhere from $2.50 to $6.00 in the 1850s—that’s $70-$160 in today’s dollars. If you look closely, you will notice that some of the portraits are of the same person. This illustrates changes in photographic technology that allowed multiple poses and pictures to be taken in one visit to the studio, cheaply and easily.