In and around Birmingham, Walker Evans made images of more than just the fish market — he made photos of workers’ homes, a boarding house with some really nice architectural detail, and the billboard above.
That turns out to be the non-extant J.W. McDonald Furniture Store, on 3rd Avenue North in Bessemer. The main part of the image has some sort of Goodnight Moon vibe; one of the only things in the area I can think of depicting an interior scene within an era of 20 years of the furniture store billboard would be this in downtown Birmingham:
Trying to imagine what the furniture store billboard really looked like, I had it colorized — but let’s get this straight — AI (yeah. I did.) did the thing. J.W. Westatd is nothing close to J.W. McDonald — but it does give a sense of what the billboard may have generallly appeared.
Looking closer:
The items here are so out of scale that it’s actually terrific. The telephone table is at the same height as the people’s heads on the sofa. The angles of the top of the window and the ceiling are off. The door is completely wonky. The amount of disorder here actually makes it charming. It’s Grandma Moses had a dizzy spell. This was grassroots advertising in the 1930s.
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I briefly tried to find the boarding house Walker Evans had photographed in Birmingham from the house number, but came to the same conclusion as so many of the historians — it’s gone. It was likely very close to downtown and those homes are just about (really, probably, completely) gone now.
I was thinking of other billboards from this era — in 2022, the Huntsville Museum of Art had an exhibit, Dorothea Lange’s America, that included this photograph of “Rural Landscape with Grapes of Wrath Billboard, California”
…which seems one of the most meta things ever, since if one considers the Great Depression, likely one of the very first images that comes to mind, her Migrant Mother photograph of 1936:
From the Kennedy Center on Lange:
“I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent [shed] with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen and there was no work for anybody. But I did not approach the tents and shelters of other stranded pea-pickers. It was not necessary; I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.”
The subject of the photo, Florence Leona Thompson, has a different recollection of her interaction with Lange, and later had grown to be embarrassed by it. The photo documented a particularly hard time of her life, and made it famous. Thompson’s family, though, found strength in it.
And on her cemetery monument, the phrase:
Migrant Mother: A Legend of the Strength of of American Motherhood
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