Minstrel Poster, Alabama 1936

Walker Evans made this photograph, "Minstrel Poster, Alabama", at an undetermined date using gelatin silver. The photograph shows a poster plastered to a brick wall, already peeling and torn when Evans found it. He's captured a moment of accidental beauty, the poster's images and text breaking down into abstraction as it ages and decays. The poster's surface is broken, revealing the rough texture of the brick beneath, a collision of representation and reality. Look at the pair of hands near the center, they seem to reach out from the wall itself, disembodied, but still gesturing. The monochrome palette enhances the sense of time passing, like an old memory fading at the edges. The formal composition reminds me of Rauschenberg's combines, where disparate elements collide to create something new. But here, time and chance are the artists. It’s not just about what’s depicted, but how the image itself has been affected, changed, and transformed.