Homeless Houses: Classifying Walker Evans's Photographs of Victorian Architecture

Abstract

In the December 1933 issue of the Museum of Modern Art Bulletin, Lincoln Kirstein announced a small exhibition of thirty-nine photographs of Victorian architecture by Walker Evans that he had assembled in the museum's Architecture room.1 He provided a pithy analysis of the work and a meditation on the medium itself: Photography is in essence a scientifically accurate process for the reproduction of objective appearances, a stationary magic that fixes a second from time's passage on a single plane. Its greatest service is documentary. Walker Evans's photographs are such perfect documents that their excellence is not assertive. In his series of American Federal and Victorian architecture … he is providing illustrations for a monumental history of the American art of building in its most imaginative and impermanent state. These wooden houses disintegrate, almost, between snaps of the lens. Many shown in these photographs no longer stand.2