Abandoned Ante-Bellum Plantation House, Vicksburg, Mississippi 1936

Walker Evans created this gelatin silver print, titled Abandoned Ante-Bellum Plantation House, Vicksburg, Mississippi, sometime in the mid-twentieth century, and like a painter, he coaxes a whole tonal range from this one colour. Look at how the light falls on the columns, evoking a tactile sense of their decay. The way the shot is framed, with the building set back from the street, almost as if it is collapsing backwards. There’s a tension between the grandeur of the architecture, its pillars and symmetry, and the palpable sense of dereliction, a history unravelling. It makes you wonder about the lives that were lived and lost within those walls, how they were erased and forgotten. Evans, like Eugène Atget, was interested in the poetry of documenting the real world as it faded. Both are masters of the melancholic image. And just as with Atget, the simple act of seeing and recording becomes a powerful form of remembrance.