Responses to “Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead"

Gastronomica invited authors Ruth Reichl, Francine Prose, Elizabeth Graver, Ellen Dore Watson and Patty Crane to reflect on Evans' photograph, to imagine the lives beyond the kitchen wall.

From the piece...

In the summer of 1936 the photographer Walker Evans collaborated with the writer James Agee on an article about cotton farmers in the American South. The article was never published, but the material they gathered eventually became the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published in 1941. For four weeks in July, Evans photographed three sharecropper families and their environment. Agee noted the significance of “bareness and space” in these homes: “general odds and ends are set very plainly and squarely discrete from one another. . . [giving] each object a full strength it would not otherwise have.” These objects only hint at the lives of the inhabitants of this house, which remain essentially unknown to us.