‘It was the truth’

Walker Evans | Allie Mae Burroughs, Wife of a Cotton Sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama (1936)

WALKER EVANS’ best-known photographs were made during the Depression. Made using a large-format camera and long exposures, these portraits were true collaborations between photographer and subject. They powerfully captured the deprivation of the time — and the dignity of those who lived through it.

This image of Allie Mae Burroughs, a sharecropper’s wife from Alabama, is both a portrait of a specific person and a classic symbol of the Depression. Devoid of any context, this simple, iconic image could be of any poor woman, from any decade.

In the Walker Evans exhibition now at SFMOMA, you can hear Allie Mae Burroughs’ deeply southern voice, complete with subtitles, from an interview recorded in the 1970s. She said of what Evans captured in this famous portrait: “It was the truth.”