This portrait from 1936 brought her photographer worldwide fame, but what good was it to Allie Mae?

In the hot, dry August of 1936, the poor Burroughs tenant farmers of Hale County, Alabama were visited by a New York writer and photographer. The writer was James Agee and the photographer was Walker Evans, both here on behalf of the magazine fortune, who wanted a report from the heart of the American South, in the midst of the Depression. Agee and Evans roamed the area for weeks, returning each time to the humble wooden farm worker’s cottage where Floyd and Allie Mae lived with their four children.

Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs were tenant farmers who shared the proceeds of their cotton crop with the landowner and homeowner, from whom they also obtained their food, medicine and seeds. In a good year they had some left over, if the children helped out on the land. The year before Evans and Agee’s arrival, the family ended up with $12 in debt.

The photos Evans took in and around the cottage of Floyd and Allie Mae and their children are among the best-known in his oeuvre and thus among the highlights in the history of 20th-century American photography. In the Burroughs series, a number of portraits of Allie Mae stand out. The 27-year-old mother of four was placed in front of the rough-wood back wall of the house and Evans took four portraits of her with his huge 8×10 Deardorff plate camera, set up right in front of her face.

You can lose yourself in the subtle differences between the portraits, which have given Allie Mae the status of the Mona Lisa of the American Depression completely beyond herself. In American PhotographsWalker Evans’ first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938, whose catalog of the same name is a monumental photobook classic, he posted the friendliest photo, presumably the most cooperative, presuming a smile, though tight-lipped .

Canon

Agee was so overwhelmed by his time in Hale County that he quickly felt that his observations and Evans’ photographs deserved a platform other than a magazine, which would soon disappear from the newsstands again. The joint project would eventually appear in 1941 in a voluminous volume entitled Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which finally became part of the canon of journalistic reporting only when it was republished in 1960, three years after Agee’s death. In that book is the image of Allie Mae in which the smile has given way to suspicion and more furrows have appeared in the face, furrows that, in retrospect, seemed to fit so seamlessly and iconicly with the cares of the mother of a poor family in hard times. And as it goes with icons: the remarkable life of Allie Mae herself (deceased in 1979, four years after the photographer) faded more and more into the background.

At the exhibition Walker Evans Revisitedthe umpteenth remarkable photo exhibition in Kunsthal Helmond (after, among others, retrospectives of Mitch Epstein and Alec Soth), we run into Allie Mae everywhere. American Photographs, the catalog of the MoMa expo, is open in a display case in which she smiles at us hesitantly. The exhibition attempts to chart the extent of the influence of Evans (1903-1975) and his apparently timeless, still so relevant oeuvre. To that end, the curators have taken a few avenues, with photographers who we might consider the stylistic descendants of Evans. And with photographers who travel, often to the same places that Evans visited ninety years earlier, sometimes photographed from the same perspective.

Black photographer and filmmaker Ramell Ross visits Hale County with its predominantly black population, which Evans and Agee had little regard for in their day. He made the beautiful photo series South County, AL and the Oscar-nominated documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening.

Rush hour

On the same family tree, George Georgiou visited 24 American cities in 14 states in 2016 to capture audiences at parades, producing huge and razor-sharp group portraits. The parade itself remains out of the picture; and the photographer is apparently invisible to the public, while the people along the side wait for the mobile festivities. It’s work that echoes that of street photographer Evans, when he set out to capture pedestrians at rush hour or, between two buttons on his overcoat, unsuspecting passengers on the New York subway. ‘The guard is down and the masks are off’he himself wrote about this way of observing.

Artist James Nares uses a similar method, who made the beautiful film in 2011. street made images of the streets of Manhattan with a high-definition camera, filmed from a moving car. Due to the high resolution, such a camera cannot film for more than six seconds, which Neres then re-enters super slow be played; the effect is hypnotic. Masks off, yes.

And then there are the photographers and artists who take Evans’ photos as the base material. Such as in the work of the Swiss duo Cortis & Sonderegger, who recreate iconic photos in their studio as dioramas, which in turn are photographed, with the glue brushes and tools included. In Helmond, their exceptional treatment of Evans’ Part of Floyd Burroughs’ Cabin to see. You can’t help but think that this whole concept of a recreated photo of their 1936 bedroom would be incomprehensible to the Burroughs.

And there’s Allie Mae again, in the conceptual After Walker Evans, in which artist Sherrie Levine in turn photographed prints in a Walker Evans photo book – a philosophical act that comments on the endless reproducibility of photography. And to confirm that once again, Michael Mandiberg then made scans of Levine’s ‘work’ (AfterSherrieLevine.com), which can be downloaded and framed according to meticulous instructions. The question remains: what or who do you have hanging on the wall?

dress

French artist Camille Fallet colored and edited Allie Mae’s famous portrait to express her admiration for Walker. The result is that it suddenly seems as if the photo was taken around the corner here yesterday. And Julia Curtin uses the pattern on Allie Mae’s dress, which she cares for and looks so clean despite her dusty, hard-working life, to create a new dress, which is portrayed separately from the wearer. Cut and paste in the digital age.

And again: isn’t this also messing around with the memory of this woman and her family, in the name of a conceptual art college? Somehow we begin to understand her furious look and her pursed lips. But that too is essentially a form of improper appropriation. We know so little about her.

Returning in the footsteps of Walker Evans seems to have become something of a rite of passage in American photography. The photographer who sticks his nose out must somehow relate to this body of work that seems to rise high above the American photographic landscape. In 1990, journalist Dale Maharidge and photographer Michael Williamson already won a Pulitzer Prize for their book And Their Children After ThemA continuation on Let Us Praise.

In 2005 the magazine went fortune also back to Hale County, looking for relatives of Allie and Floyd for a story about The Most Famous Story We Never Told, as the headline above the piece said. They found Charles Burroughs, the youngest son, then immortalized by the photographer at the age of 4 and now the elderly owner of a welding business, still living near the old cotton fields where the family toiled. Charles is better off than his parents ever had and can’t shake the guilt about it. “They never had a chance to make anything out of it.”

Seventy years after the photos were taken, he still feels anger welling up over the fact that he and his family served as models for abject poverty during the Depression years. And that there was absolutely nothing wrong with that. “They should have had more respect for us. They could at least have sent the book.’