The Physiognomy of a Nation

Abstract This essay revisits American Photographs, one of the most important photographic books of the 1930s. Containing two portfolios by Walker Evans and an essay by Lincoln Kirstein, the 1938 publication presents readers with eighty-seven photographs printed one per double-page spread. While critical studies of the book have focused on the sequential ordering of the photographs, and on the book's filmic qualities, this essay considers the book's other organizing principle: physiognomy. More specifically, focusing on Evans's decision to include three photographs that he made in Cuba into the book's first part, it attends to the processes of racialization organizing the book and producing America in the 1930s. Challenging canonical accounts of American Photographs and Depression-era documentary more broadly, this essay argues for a history of documentary that does not dispense with its modernism. The argument is not that modernism is still with us but that we need its repetitions.