The Tenant Farmer's Wife

The Tenant Farmer's Wife. Jerrica Hinson Lisa Phelps ENG112-IN06 Due Date: 11/16/2025.

Photographer: Walker Evans. Most of the photographs taken by Walker Evans were taken in Hale County, Alabama in and around the four-room cabin of Floyd and Allie Mae Burroughs and their children. He and James Agee, a writer, collaborated during this time as they lived on and off on this farm for several weeks during that summer..

Walker Evans.... Walker Evans was born November 3,1903 in St. Louis, Missouri, and died April 10, 1975, in New Haven, Connecticut. Initially, Evans aspired to be a writer and spent some time in Paris in his mid-20s. He returned to the U.S. and gradually turned to photography His career spans the late 1920s through the 1970s, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential American photographers of the twentieth century..

Allie Mae Burroughs. A person with dark hair wearing a polka dot shirt AI-generated content may be incorrect..

Four Photographs. Walker Evans captured four photographs of Allie Mae against the rear wall of the family's cabin. Although they were all composed in a similar manner, Evans photographs took record of distinct facial expressions from bemused cooperation to angry, resentful mood and expression. She portrayed her frustration by tilting her head and giving an expression that was obviously upset. In 1938, Evans selected for his seminal publication, American Photographs, the negative that shows Allie Mae at her most content, welcoming, and accessible way..

Allie Mae.... She is shown in a simple dress, standing or seated against the wooden siding of her cabin, in August 1936. The composition is frontal, direct, giving attention to her face, expression, posture, and background, all minimal and un-embellished. The image does not romanticize; it presents the subject in her dignity and hardship. The worn clothing, the plain background, the direct gaze combine to convey a sense of presence and endurance. The subject of this photograph is Allie Mae Burroughs, wife of a cotton sharecropper (tenant farmer) in Hale County, Alabama..

Dirt Poor. Floyd Burroughs was a cotton "sharecropper" sometimes known as a "halver." When it was time to harvest, he would give the landlord half of his cotton and corn crop to pay off any debt incurred during the year for their food, seed, fertilizer, and medicines. The prior year, the Burroughs family ended their year with $12 worth of debt still owed to their landlord..

The Burroughs Family. The Burroughs family had nothing that was truly theirs or that was owned by them. Not their home, land, mules, or farm tools; all these items were leased from their landlord..

Let us now praise famous men. In his publication for "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," Evans chose a photograph that presented a more closed and irritated Allie Mae. He wanted to portray her as a victim of the Great Depression and of the camera burrowing in her family affairs. It is this portrait, with the psychological ambiguity of a Mona Lisa, which was seized upon by early reviewers as the book's quintessential image..

The Great Depression. The photograph conveys dignity amid hardship. The subject’s expression is neither abundant joy nor resigned despair—but quietly present, marking the weight of her circumstances. It also stands as a symbol of broader social conditions: the exploitation implicit in tenant farming, the inequality of land ownership, the socio-economic burden of debt and dependency. The photograph implicitly prompts the viewer to reflect not just on this individual but on the system in which she exists. On the aesthetic level, by presenting her in a matter-of-fact way, Evans allows the viewer to see the subject as she is, rather than as a caricature of poverty or victimhood. There’s a neutrality that invites reflection, rather than an explicit message. Importantly, Evans resisted the “sentimental” or “pitying” gaze; his rich tension lies in depicting the subject’s humanity without reducing her to symbol only.

Tenant Farmer’s Wife, Hale County, Alabama is a photograph by Walker Evans from 1936, made as part of his documentation of impoverished tenant-farming families in the American South. It reflects the socio-economic realities of the time, while also exemplifying Evans’s aesthetic of the everyday, the vernacular, treated with a direct, unsentimental gaze. Influenced by Eugène Atget and his own literary ambitions, Evans bridged modernist form and documentary content, producing an image that remains both historically significant and artistically resonant..

Allie MaE Burroughs 1979. Memorial photo 115384438.