Brooklyn Bridge, New York

Walker Evans

1929

Walker Evans’s gelatin silver print isolates the Brooklyn Bridge’s underside into a monumental, abstracted form, aiming to reveal the city’s modern structure through bold geometry.

The image strikes you with a dark, V‑shaped mass of steel filling the frame—its perforated ribs funneling the eye down to a hazy skyline and silhouetted barges that give the composition scale and weight.

By treating industrial architecture as formal composition, the photograph helped steer American photography toward a modernist documentary sensibility that found beauty and social meaning in urban infrastructure.

Palette

Art Terms

Gelatin silverprint (developing-out paper) Photography Cityscape Architecture Documentary photography Abstraction

Exhibitions

Walker Evans: Photographs of Nineteenth-Century Houses

1933

Walker Evans' Subway, 1938–1941

1966

Walker Evans: American Photographs

1938

Walker Evans: American Photographs

1962