American Photographs.

presentation copy inscribed to James Stern

First edition, inscribed: 'To Jimmy Stern with love and admiration and / gratitude / far more than I can express / Walker Evans'.

Evans and James Stern shared a lifelong friendship and moved in the same literary and artistic circles, they were introduced to one another by James Agee.

In 1938, the Museum of Modern Art staged an exhibition of Evans' photographs, the first exhibition at the museum to be devoted to the work of a single photographer. Evans worked closely with Lincoln Kirstein on the edit and sequence of the photographs, both for the exhibition and in the accompanying book American Photographs, for which Kirstein also provided the essay. Kirstein writes, 'In Evans's pictures of temples or shelters the presence or absence of the people who created them is the most important thing… The structures are social rather than artistic monuments. The photographs are social documents!'

Evans and Kirstein divided the book into two thoughtfully sequenced sections. The first shows American citizens, or their representations, alone, in groups, and often within the context of their built environments. The second shows these environments and comprises the 'streets and storefronts, homes and graveyards, industrial plants and roadside stands [that] are frozen in time, many of them in a permanent state of decay.'

First edition, inscribed by Evans in black ink on front free endpaper; 4to (222 x 199 mm, 8¾ x 7¾ in); black and white photographs printed in relief halftone by The Spiral Press, New York from plates made by Beck Engraving Company, occasional light foxing; cream endpapers, black cloth-covered boards, border in blind, printed title-label mounted on spine, corners and head and foot of spine rubbed, printed dust jacket, grey with text in black, toned and marked, corners chipped tear to upper panel at fold, without the errata slip and without the band, a good copy; [ii], 198, [8]pp.