The State Street Theatre, Chicago

Walker Evans began his 20-year tenure as photographer and photo editor at Fortune magazine in 1945. For the February 1947 feature, “Chicago: A Camera Exploration of the Huge, Energetic Urban Sprawl of the Midlands,” Evans was described as avoiding the city’s “prized and remarkable postcard colossi,” focusing instead on sights that made the city “one of the most arresting spots in the hemisphere.” This unpublished image of an advertisement for the 1940 exploitation film Souls in Pawn exemplifies Evans’s ongoing obsession with the American vernacular language of signs and advertisements. He took it at the Joyland Theater (originally the Chicago Theatre), a burlesque club and movie theater that stood on State Street in Chicago’s South Loop.
— Permanent collection label