Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania

Walker Evans made this photograph of Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania, with what seems like simple directness. But look closer, it’s anything but. The image is a study in contrasts – the solid, boxy houses versus the unruly trees, the sharp lines of the telephone poles against the soft, blurred road. The telephone pole is so present, it almost feels like a figure, a stand-in for a person, or maybe for the photographer himself. There's a melancholic atmosphere, yet the composition is so solid, so deliberate. It reminds me of the photographs of Eugene Atget, in the way that it finds a strange beauty in the everyday. It’s this tension between the beauty and the banality that makes the image so compelling. Like all great art, it resists easy answers.