One of the best-known photographs from Walker Evans‘ time in Birmingham for the FSA is this:
Roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama
Digital ID: (digital file from b&w dup. neg.) fsa 8c52874 http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/fsa.8c52874
Reproduction Number: LC-DIG-fsa-8c52874 (digital file from b&w dup. neg.) LC-DIG-ppmsc-00239 (digital file from print) LC-USF342-T01-008253 (b&w film dup. neg.)
Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print
For a number of years, the business at 1928 Vanderbilt Road has been known as River Fish Market, and the building just this year was torn down.
From October 2025:
…and now.
From a Christie’s sale of this image in 2018 originally from James Agee’s own collection:
Roadside Stand near Birmingham is rich with so many of those essential visual qualities that most interested Walker Evans. The ample inclusion of signage and of the written word in this image is a shining example of Evans’ unique presentation of rural American society of this period…
In the exhibition catalogue for the retrospective held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2000, Jeff Rosenheim suggests that this very image may have been the first taken by Evans during his trip to the American South with James Agee in 1936. Early images from this project documenting this region do indeed include heavy emphasis on roadside signage and storefronts along small-town main streets. The rest of the duo’s trip, eventually centering on Hale County, Alabama, would ultimately lead to the images of the Burroughs and Tingle families and environs, subsequently included in the collaborative book by Agee and Evans Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, published first in 1939. (Portraits from that series can be found in Lots 23 and 119.)
Ah, I actually don’t generally enjoy this but couldn’t help but wonder what it would look colorized, and this is how it turned out (if this is cringe to you, I promise it is to me too…but…still.). Now I can make out so much clearer the girl in the background, the cannas in bloom…the chairs behind the facade and the bicycle…
The striping on the watermelons is a little too elaborate/imagined here, but you can really take in how well done the fish painting is over the opening. This is part produce stand, part fish market, part come-see-us-about-moving-a-house. And the “honest weights, square dealings” is just perfect.
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