Minstrel Poster, Alabama 1936

Walker Evans made this photograph in Alabama. It shows a poster for a minstrel show plastered on a brick wall, already ripped and worn. I imagine Walker Evans standing there, feeling something deeply about the performance advertised on this crumbling surface. He might have been thinking about how images and ideas decay over time, about how the past keeps speaking to us in fragments, if only we're listening. The poster is torn, yes, but it’s also still performing! Look how the composition is split between the poster and the brick. The poster with its exaggerated caricatures versus the solid wall. I wonder what the artist was thinking. How might he be asking us to consider the uncomfortable realities of representation and history? I think he is inviting us to look critically at the layers of meaning embedded in everyday scenes.