Olivier Richon, Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner

For this event, Olivier Richon (Royal College of Art) will draw on his One Work book Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner, to discuss Evans’s significance for employing a photographic form that privileges detachment, as well as for calling attention to overlooked objects and the architecture of the dispossessed.

Kitchen Corner shows a painstakingly clean-swept corner in the house of a white Alabama sharecropper family. Taken in 1936, this photograph was not published until 1960, when it was included in a new edition of Walker Evans and James Agee’s classic Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The 1960 reissue of the book had an enormous impact on Americans’ perceptions of the Great Depression and its effect on the lives of America’s working class. In his book, Richon works through a detailed examination of the image, allowing each depicted object to become an opportunity to excavate meaning and reveal an unexpected association of ideas about the documentary form.

Olivier Richon is an artist and Professor of Photography at the Royal College of Art.

Olivier Richon, Walker Evans: Kitchen Corner
Monday 18 February 2019, 17:30–19:00

LVMH Lecture Theatre
Central Saint Martins
University of the Arts London
Granary Building
1 Granary Square
London
N1C 4AA

This event is presented in conjunction with the Central Saint Martins Fine Art Programme Guest Lecture Series.

The One Work series is distributed by The MIT Press.