PBA Galleries

Vintage gelatin silver print. 14x15.8 cm. (5½x6¼").

Classic image from the Great Depression, young men leaping aboard a freight train in search of greener pastures, from the time when Walker Evans was working for the Resettlement Administration. The photograph reflects the mood of those difficult times, when many unemployed people traveled to California to work on the farms, and without money for train fare, hopped aboard a freight train heading in the right direction. The Depression years of 1935-36 were remarkably productive for Evans. In June 1935 he accepted a job with the U.S. Department of the Interior to photograph a government-built resettlement community of unemployed coal miners in West Virginia. This temporary employment soon led to a full-time position as an "information specialist" in the Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration. Under the direction of Roy Striker, the RA/FSA photographers (Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Russell Lee, among others) set out to document small-town life and to demonstrate how the federal government was attempting to improve the lot of rural communities during the Depression. Evans' images during this period made him the preeminent documentarian of America in the 1930s, and his images became and still are a major part of the visual history of the Depression. The only other vintage print of this image known is in a private English collection, as documented in the Bridgeman Art Library. The number notation on the verso (RA 822-Z-B) beginning with RA points to the image's date of creation, namely 1936 when Evans was working for the Resettlement Administration (RA), which became the FSA in 1937.