Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead

Among a collection of mounted kitchen utensils, what appears to be the scraps of a lithographic magazine advertisement remain on the wall in Walker Evans’s “Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead” (1936, gelatin silver print).  Hamlin Garland documented the practice in his collection of stories Main-Traveled Roads (1891).

Then they entered the house, into the sitting room, poor, bare, art-forsaken little room, too, with its rag carpet, its square clock, and its two or three chromos [chromolithographs] and pictures from Harper’s Weekly pinned about.

-Hamlin Garland, “The Return of a Private”

Then came again the assertive odor of stagnant air, laden with camphor; he felt the springless bed under him, and caught dimly a few soap-advertising lithographs on the walls.  He thought of his brother, in his still more inhospitable bedroom, disturbed by the child, condemned to rise at five o’clock and begin another day’s pitiless labor.

-Hamlin Garland, “Up the Coulee“