African Art Portfolio

1935
Walker Evans

At the request of Alfred Barr, director of the MoMA, Walker Evans (1903–1975) photographed the objects exhibited in African Negro Art (1935). Working at night for nearly a year until April 1936, he created 17 portfolios each containing 477 photographs for use by universities. Faithful to his “documentary style”, the objects are endowed with sobriety and monumentality at the same time, no longer ethnographic items but works of art with a marked presence.