Penny Picture Display, Savannah, 1936 by Walker Evans.

One of the benefits of working for the FSA during the Depression was the loan of an 8x10 Deardorff view camera, which Walker Evans used to capture this image of a photographer’s window display in Savannah, Georgia. On the market from 1923 through 1988, these large format cameras were loaded with individual film sheets, good for a single exposure. With its various moving parts and extensions, the camera offered the greatest control for professional photographers in creating their images. Evans sent his 8x10 negatives in individual envelopes inscribed with technical information about the shot back to the FSA headquarters in Washington, D.C., where they were later printed.

In Penny Picture Display, Evans discovers a kind of anonymous portraiture in the way that he makes this photograph of other photographs, or, in this case, many photos. In just a few years he would set about surreptitiously capturing anonymous portraits on the subway in New York with a concealed handheld camera, a project that could not be accomplished with a massive view camera used here.