Corrugated

In the 1930s the Farm Security Administration, part of FDR’s New Deal, sent photographers across the country to document the impact of the Great Depression.  Some headed to the South.  Among them was Walker Evans.  The photos he made on his Southern sojourn have become iconic.  He and his FSA colleagues created many of the enduring tropes of Southern photography, in effect establishing for generations of photographers, including many working today, what the South is supposed to look like when it's photographed.  

One way influential photographers become influential is by revealing the aesthetic possibilities of subjects previously considered unphotogenic.  Evans did that in 1936 when he showed us that light raking across the ripples of corrugated tin could be, as he put it, “transcendent.”  Invented in 1829 by British engineer and architect Henry Palmer, corrugated metal became a commonplace building material not only in the American South but all over the globe.  It was inexpensive, easy to manufacture, and, because it was light and stackable, well-suited for shipping.  When Evans encountered it on the façade of contractor Richard Perkins’s warehouse in Moundville, Alabama, he was “knocked over,” “taken in by the cross light on silvery, corrugated tin.”  The resulting photo is one of his most famous.

Unpainted, it can shine; painted, it can glow.  However, for me it is most evocative and beautiful when it has acquired the orange-brown patina that is a signature color of the rural South, the work of sun, rain, and time.

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