Diana Davies is a well-known photographer of folk performers and festivals, who photographed the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in its earlier years. The Davies photographs already held by the Rinzler Archives have been supplemented by a recent donation of additional photographs (contact sheets, prints, and slides) of the Newport Folk Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Poor People's March on Washington, the Georgia Sea Islands, and miscellaneous personalities of the American folk revival.

What is the specific sin of the Revolution? It is not just the sin of pride and sensuality. Rather it is the sin of elevating pride and sensuality to supreme values according to which life must be organized.

The new march was named the Christopher Street Liberation Day March to shift attention from the Mafia-controlled Stonewall and onto the gay and lesbian struggle for liberation happening in the streets. Despite widespread fear of police obstruction and public violence, the march went on, traveling uptown on Sixth Avenue from Greenwich Village to Central Park for the "Gay Be-In." All of the New York City gay and lesbian groups participated--both the new generation and established veterans--as well as visitors, and the march attracted national media attention. A sister march was held in Los Angeles and others soon followed around the world.

It was only a few decades ago — a very short time in historical terms — that the situation of gay men and lesbians was radically different from what it is today. At the end of the 1960s, homosexual sex was illegal in every state but Illinois. Not one law — federal, state, or local — protected gay men or women from being fired or denied housing. There were no openly gay politicians. No television show had any identifiably gay characters. When Hollywood made a film with a major homosexual character, the character was either killed or killed himself. There were no openly gay policemen, public school teachers, doctors, or lawyers. And no political party had a gay caucus.

The idea for a gay community march started in 1970 with the Christopher Street Gay Liberation March. The event originated outside of the Stonewall Inn, at 53 Christopher Street, the morning of June 28, 1970, and continued up Fifth Avenue to end in Central Park. The march started with only a few hundred people at Stonewall and ended with several thousand by the time it concluded in Central Park. The marches formed to bring gay and lesbian individuals together and show they were a sizable minority population, something that mainstream society did not believe. The purpose of the march was to build a safe community for homosexuals

This was long before anyone had heard of a “Gay Pride March.” Back then, it took a new sense of audacity and courage to take that giant step into the streets of Midtown Manhattan. One by one, we encouraged people to join the assembly. Finally, we began to move up Sixth Avenue. I stayed at the head of the march the entire way, and at one point, I climbed onto the base of a light pole and looked back. I was astonished; we stretched out as far as I could see, thousands of us. There were no floats, no music, no boys in briefs. The cops turned their backs on us to convey their disdain, but the masses of people kept carrying signs and banners, chanting and waving to surprised onlookers.

Walker Evans's "Lucille Burroughs, Daughter of a Cotton Sharecropper. Hale County, Alabama" (1936).

Evans's portrait of Lucille is elegant in its simplicity. She is shown from the shoulders up, her face framed by a straw hat, standing against the wooden planking of one of the outbuildings of the farm the Burroughs family worked as tenants. There is nothing superfluous, and the 8-by-10 negative of Evans's view camera captures the textures of the included elements with great specificity. The rust bleeding from the nails in the untreated wood is a clue to the family's economic condition, but poverty is not evident elsewhere in the picture.

But it is Lucille Burroughs's face, the center of the image, that holds our attention. Our face-recognition apparatus sees she is young, white, of apparent Anglo-Saxon heritage, and although her features are regular, and even attractive, there is something in her face—in the picture of her face—that lets us know she was not born to wealth. More difficult than culling that sociological information is trying to suss out her expression. Her eyes are focused intently on Evans, the photographer who commands the black box with its bellows and dials and its one great all-seeing eye, a city man, a New Yorker, who came to their farm looking for what?

There are some images that are iconic: meaning that a single image becomes the watch-word for a much wider issue. The image of Allie Mae Burroughs in the summer of 1936 in Hale County, Alabama is one such image. Her young face, aged prematurely by the work, anxiety and hardships of life in the Depression in the Deep South in the 1930′s has come to symbolise the struggle of share-croppers and their families.

At the end of the cotton and corn season, half the crop was given to the landlord, along with payment for food, fertiliser, seed and medicine. In the year ending 1935, after a years hard toil, the family were $12 in debt. An improvement on 1934, when after another year of toil, the family were $200 in debt. The landlord had the pencil and the book, the education and the power to manipulate if he chose. There was a cycle of poverty that was akin to a revolving door. There was no way out.

Evans took 4 images of Allie Mae one Sunday afternoon in August 1936, against the backdrop of the roughly hewn clapper board cabin. Each image is slightly different: the pose remains almost the same, but the pursed lips, the furrowed brow and the tilt of the head, show a mounting discomfort at her image being recorded. At the age of 27, she should have been in the prime of health, but with a hard life, no money and four children to feed and the wider anxiety of their condition, she had aged quickly.

The progenitor of the documentary tradition in American photography, Evans had the extraordinary ability to see the present as if it were already the past, and to translate that knowledge and historically inflected vision into an enduring art. His principal subject was the vernacular—the indigenous expressions of a people found in roadside stands, cheap cafés (1971.646.35), advertisements (1987.1100.59), simple bedrooms, and small-town main streets. For fifty years, from the late 1920s to the early 1970s, Evans recorded the American scene with the nuance of a poet and the precision of a surgeon, creating an encyclopedic visual catalogue of modern America in the making.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), a lyric journey to the limits of direct observation. Its 500 pages of words and pictures is a volatile mix of documentary description and intensely subjective, even autobiographical writing, which endures as one of the seminal achievements of twentieth-century American letters. Evans' photographs for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men are stunningly honest representations of the faces (2001.415), bedrooms, and clothing of individual farmers living on a dry hillside seventeen miles north of Greensboro, Alabama. As a series, they seem to have elucidated the whole tragedy of the Great Depression; individually, they are intimate, transcendent, and enigmatic. For many, they are the apogee of Evans' career in photography.

This photograph was taken by Evans, while he was working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The subject of the photograph is one of the tenant farmers, whom Evans had got to know, while documenting life in Alabama's devastated cotton belt during the Depression. Evans intended these photographs to represent an objective, non-propagandist record of the Depression. He strove not to create iconic images, but, instead, to be descriptive and avoid stereotypes. Evans and the writer, James Agee who accompanied him on the project, later collaborated to make a book of photographs and writing, called 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.'

This photograph was taken by Evans, while he was working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The subject of the photograph is one of the tenant farmers, whom Evans had got to know, while documenting life in Alabama's devastated cotton belt during the Depression. Evans intended these photographs to represent an objective, non-propagandist record of the Depression. He strove not to create iconic images, but, instead, to be descriptive and avoid stereotypes. Evans and the writer, James Agee who accompanied him on the project, later collaborated to make a book of photographs and writing, called 'Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.'

So he goes back again and again to Mills Hill, drawn by a powerful memory that "digs down deep inside your heart and soul." A memory of cotton, of endless labor, of hunger at the end of the day, and of Allie Mae Burroughs, his own mother. We know her too, when she was 27, thanks to Walker Evans: her thin lips, wrinkled forehead, hard jaw, and most of all her eyes, those living eyes that search our own and collapse the span of decades. But one memory, at least, belongs to Burroughs alone: "I can almost hear her calling me home."

in the summer of 1936, FORTUNE sent writer Agee and photographer Evans south to document the lives of cotton sharecroppers. Their story was to be part of a series called "Life and Circumstances."

A memory of cotton, of endless labor, of hunger at the end of the day, and of Allie Mae Burroughs, his own mother. We know her too, when she was 27, thanks to Walker Evans: her thin lips, wrinkled forehead, hard jaw, and most of all her eyes, those living eyes that search our own and collapse the span of decades.

"Evans believed his photographs were self-explanatory; the presence of words implied that the image was somehow deficient." Keeping the images separate from Agee's text brought more recognition to the images themselves, and it was a total break from the trends of photo-journalism, which used images to illustrate text. The images are quintessential of Evans' "documentary style"; Evans' dis-interested approach to these families resulted in portraying them with dignity and strength, although they lived in complete poverty. He sought to show the beauty of order and respectability within such an impoverished condition.

The blunt honesty with which Agee and Evans conveyed a bleak national situation resulted in Fortune's rejection of the story as too controversial, but Agee's account and thirty one of Evans's images were published in 1941 as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This photograph of Allie Mae Burroughs, the female head of one of three sharecropper families on whom Evans and Agee focused, has become an icon of twentieth century art. The simplicity of Mrs. Burroughs's self presentation, the shallow depth of field, and the narrow tonal range of the print seem to illustrate perfectly the austerity of her circumstances. But it is Evans's masterful rendering of her individual demeanor-the strength of will communicated through the intensity of her expression-that transforms the image from a sentimental portrait of socioeconomic vulnerability into a striking declaration of human determination.