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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?

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.'

"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.