Walker Evans: Signs traces one particular theme - signs of all kinds - through the long career of this master photographer. The book brings together images from the era and place most closely associated with Evans, namely, the rural South of the 1930s. But also included are photographs that will be less familiar to many of Evans' admirers, such as his images of New York City street scenes and advertising or the photographs he took in Chicago and Havana. Andrei Codrescu's essay brings a fresh perspective to this great photographer's passionate investigation of the signs he discovered in the...

More than any other artist, Walker Evans invented the images of essential America that we have long since accepted as fact, and his work has influenced not only modern photography but also literature, film and visual arts in other mediums. The original edition of American Photographs was a carefully prepared letterpress production, published by The Museum of Modern Art in 1938 to accompany an exhibition of photographs by Evans that captured scenes of America in the early 1930s. As noted on the jacket of the first edition, Evans, -photographing in New England or Louisiana, watching a...