Photography

Item Description

Walker Evans (American, 1903-1975)
Greek Revival Doorway, 204 West Thirteenth Street, New York City, ca. 1933, printed 1974
Printer: Richard Benson
Publisher: Double Elephant Press
Gelatin silver print
Image: 11 1/8 x 8 3/4 inches
Edition: 75 of 15 artist proofs
Signed and number A/P in pencil on mount recto

Walker Evans is one of the world's most important and influential photographers. Though Evans' health was deteriorating (and he would die a year later in 1975), the artist supervised the Double Elephant Press' publication of a portfolio of fifteen gelatin silver prints.

This image is from that portfolio and although it was published as being dated to ca. 1931, the negative may have actually been made sometime during the summer of 1933 (see Walker Evans Archive, The Metropolitan Museum of Art). 

This was a period in which Evans was living hand to mouth and he noted in his diary: “Spending pennies. How I eat three times a day is a mystery." Relief came in the form of work for the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera and his painter-wife Frida Kahlo, who were then living on West 13th Street, a few doors down from where this photograph was taken. Frida paid Evans to take photographs of her paintings while Rivera commissioned him to document the mural Portrait of America, which he was then painting for The New Workers’ School. 

About Richard Benson, Printer

The Double Elephant Portfolio was printed by the master Richard Benson, who met Walker Evans when the artist was teaching at Yale’s School of Art.  Benson received his MA from Yale and was dean of the Yale School of Art from 1996 to 2006. He was on the faculty from 1979 until his retirement in 2011.

Richard Benson is the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award for his radical transformation of offset lithography and other printing technologies. Benson also printed for Paul Strand and his pioneering work is a seen in such noted publications as The Work of Atget, The Face of Lincoln, Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company, and more than a dozen books by Lee Friedlander.

A solo exhibition of his own photographs, Richard Benson: North South East West, was on view at The Museum of Modern Art in the fall 2011.