Eye: Walker Evans’ iconic images take over SFMOMA.

ICONIC IMAGES TAKE OVER SFMOMA

Some 300 photos, 100 objects present artist’s unique take on America

Walker Evans was such an influential 20th century American photographer — and writer, editor and teacher — that when a wide range of his images is displayed, it’s as if we’ve seen them before.

For one thing, it’s iconic Americana, from Victorian architecture to Broadway marquees to fading industrial towns.

For another, during his 50-year career Evans inspired generations of photographers. They viewed the nation with as penetrating a gaze as he directed at worn but stalwart Southern sharecroppers, roadside produce stands, crowded city storefronts and layers of posters on brick walls.

Now there’s an opportunity to see his originals in a vast collection that has arrived in San Francisco — via Paris. The 300 photographs, plus 100 other items from his collections and published works, make up the exhibit “Walker Evans,” originally subtitled “A Vernacular Style.”

The exhibit originated at the Centre Pompidou museum in Paris and has been installed in two separate sections at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, almost filling the third floor. The curator, in France and San Francisco, is Clement Cheroux, who is now SFMOMA’s senior curator of photography. The show runs through Feb. 4.

The sprawling exhibit is curiously organized by overlapping themes, and some subjects seem

SFMOMA Walker Evans’ photo of a roadside stand near Birmingham, Alabama, is one of many of the photographer’s images of the Depression-era South on view at SFMOMA.