Signs

Thames and Hudson, London, 1998, 69 pages. Areas of fading to front and back cover, otherwise good secondhand condition.

From the late 1920s until the time of his death in 1975, renowned photographer Walker Evans returned obsessively to particular subjects. His fascination with signs resulted in some of his greatest photographs; billboards and movie posters, newspaper headlines and theatre marquees. This book brings together 50 of these photographs from the Getty Museum's large collection of Evans's work. There are images from the era and place most closely associated with Evans, the rural South of the 1930s, but there are also less familiar photographs - New York City street scenes and advertising, pictures he took in Chicago or Detroit and in Havana. Andrei Codrescu has written an essay specially for the book, that brings a fresh perspective to his great photographer's passionate investigation of the signs he discovered in the urban North, the rural South and beyond.