Sidewalk and Shopfront, New Orleans

Walker Evans is widely recognized as a key figure in documentary photography. His simple yet poignant photographs of the American vernacular—including hand-painted signs, quiet domestic interiors, and small-town street scenes—came together in his landmark 1938 exhibition and publication, American Photographs. Evans created nearly two-thirds of the images in the book during his travels through the South, beginning with a two-month visit to New Orleans in early 1935. A New York businessman had hired Evans to produce a book of photographs on the decaying neoclassical architecture of riverfront plantation houses. Although the project was never realized, Evans’s forays into the city’s French Quarter resulted in some of his most iconic images. This photograph of a Bourbon Street barbershop’s exterior, covered with mismatched stripes, is slightly cropped in the book; this particular print presents a fuller view of the scene to the top, right, and bottom.