Frame Houses in Virginia 1936

Walker Evans made this photograph, Frame Houses in Virginia, using a camera, sometime during his lifetime. I think of all the things Walker Evans might have been looking at, and how this image came to be. The eye travels along the horizontal weatherboards of those houses, and then zig-zags up the angled roofs. There is a poignancy in the image; I see a quiet, spare dignity, and maybe a kind of visual elegy for everyday America. The image feels very frontal. And those houses, lined up like a row of stoic figures, share a similar kind of silence. I see echoes of other photographers like Eugène Atget. I get the sense that Walker Evans was in deep conversation with other artists and their way of seeing. It's like he was holding a mirror up to America, reflecting back what he saw with such clarity and grace.