SIGNED BY EVANS WITH AN ORIGINAL PHOTOGRAPH EVANS, WALKER. American Photographs. Essay by Lincoln Kirstein. Illustrated with reproductions of Evans's important photographs of the American social landscape. Small 4to, black cloth with the cream paper title label on backstrip, lightly edgeworn; printed dust jacket, worn with chips, loss and creases to edges and folds, age-darkened. Roth 98; Parr/Badger I 114; Hasselblad 128; Auer 263. first edition, signed twice by evans, with an original photograph. (New York): The Museum of Modern Art, (1938)
Gifted by Walker Evans to his friend, William McK. Chapman.
Chapman was a journalist and editor from about 1915 to 1960 at The Brooklyn Eagle, Sports Illustrated, Time, Inc. and House and Garden magazines. Through the course of their careers, Evans and Chapman became friends. This book may have been inscribed when Evans stayed at Chapman's Charleston, South Carolina home in the early 1970s.
With an original photograph by Walker Evans taped to the front free endpaper, inscribed and signed. The photograph depicts the daughter of a mutual friend of Chapman and Evans named Eliza Hobson. Hobson was the daughter of an editor at Newsweek and her mother, Verna, was J. Robert Oppenheimer's personal executive secretary at The Institute of Advaanced Studies in Princeton, New Jersey.
The book is additionally signed, "To Bill Chapman, (1938-1971 is a respectable stretch, isn't it, congratulations!) / Walker." This charming volume demonstrates both the importance of the book as a medium of creative expression and the fluid world of art and publishing.
