WALKER EVANS (American, 1903-1975) HIGHWAY CORN

There is nothing tidy about nearly 50 years in photography. Not if the years begin with basic tenets of 1920s European Modernism, are influenced by the great literary and cultural thinkers of the age, contribute to the definition of the American character and also embrace an obsessive collecting of commercial, advertising and road signs. No calling that extensive can be that neat, especially when it is Walker Evans'. Hindsight, however, helps rank an artist's keener revelations. One such moment for Evans came when he placed his 8 x 10 view camera smack in front of a telephone pole on a highway corner in Reedsville, West Virginia in June 1935 and created a picture so rich in pictorial complexity it is tempting to see the sum of Evans' extensive talent in it. Perhaps Evans found the picture too arty. He hardly ever printed it.

First and foremost this is a modern photograph, the type that makes the viewer acutely aware that something has happened to the scene's reality during the photography act. The picture plane is so flat; it is a cartographer's dream. The pole splits the frame in the purest of Modernist conceits. What is close pulls what is far right up to the edge of the frame so densely, you can't help but realize that in exposing the film, three dimensions have been squeezed to two and reduced to the scale of a single sheet of loose leaf paper.

HIGHWAY CORNER, REEDSVI LLE is a map, directing the eye to its essential elements. A prototypical southern crossroads with gas station architecture and signage, Evans' love for civilization's vernacular evidence literally is read in the picture. Highway signs point the way into and out of the frame–graphic markers with nowhere to go. Every line is woven together, from the cracks in the pavement to the telephone wires marring an otherwise bucolic sky.

Gibson's Motor Co. advertisements, painted on the cinder block walls read as if decals on the print's surface just as the phone pole's stenciled "533" feels inked on as well. Twenty years later, Jasper Johns would begin to paint numbers, maps, flags and targets appropriating the sign painter's same simple typeface. Soon after, Lee Friedlander began making photographs that embraced street corners, shop windows and traffic signs with a careful consideration for their literal and figurative effects.

The words in the picture read like a directory. No apparent narrative binds them other than a visual one. Edges propitiously slice words in quarters, halves and thirds so that American becomes "AM", Reedsville, VA becomes simply "REEDS VA". No meaning in the words but in how they function in the picture. Above it all however, two stand out, making a statement as if an automatic poem: "PUBLIC" and "CONNECTIONS". Perhaps this was how Evans interpreted his responsibility, knowing he was under the employ of Roy Stryker's New Deal agency, the Farm Security Administration.

Prints of HIGHWAY CORNER, REEDSVILLE, WEST VIRGINIA are considered quite rare. As of this writing, only three lifetime prints have been located in museum collections: an FSA file print in the collection of the New York Public Library (exhibited in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2000 Evans retrospective); a later print in the J. Paul Getty Museum; and a print in The Minneapolis Institute of Arts. A survey of major photography private collections supports its rarity – none have yet to be located. Only one print of this image has appeared at auction in the last 25 years.