Getty Museum
Secondhand Shop Window
Creator
Walker EvansAmerican Photographer · 1903–1975
All works by this person →> Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt. > > -- Walker Evans Walker Evans began to photograph in the late 1920s, making snapshots during a European trip. Upon his return to New Y
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1930
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- American
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
Through the great equalizer of time, a once-fashionable porcelain mannequin's head is wedged in amongst a smattering of utilitarian household objects in a second-hand shop window display. Probably a milliner's display head sporting a chic, bobbed hairstyle, the ceramic face stands in silent witness to the cluttered fate of the culture's cast-offs during the Great Depression. Walker Evans was frequently drawn to such incongruous, surreal scenes, in which an unlikely element appears out of its original context and thereby assumes a new relationship to the objects around it.
The authoritative record is held by Getty Museum. LinkedCulture surfaces this object and its connections; it does not alter institutional metadata.
Get printable QR codesHide QR codes
Open QR codes for this object page and the museum record. They stay collapsed until needed.
Related across collections
Semantically similar works from Getty Museum and other institutions.